Falling From Trees
by Draenog Glas
Summary: Sonic is alone in a hospital, with very little hints to what happened that caused him to stay there for two days. He wishes that he spent that time with Shadow, who tells him he needs to get the treatment needed in order to recover from his condition, bipolar disorder, and he wonders if he can truly recover from his mental illness. AU, Sonadow. Warning for self-harm and suicide.
1. An Introduction to the Patient

**AN: I know this doesn't sound like a Sonic fanfic, but I decided to write something to vent about some stuff that's been going on with me.**

**Right now the lithium treatment has really worked for me, but for a long time, I felt confused about my condition. That the manic highs felt so good that I never wanted my bipolar to go away. After all, being manic was the reason why I made so much progress on my stories, even though there were at times where I dealt with crippling depression that made me lose my confidence and I would often not write for even as long as a month because I would beat myself up too much.**

**It was until I thought about suicide and the chaos and the disorganized nature of the mania was beginning to take a toll on my health. I would barely eat and sleep for a week or so. The lows were getting to the point where I would sleep all 24 hours, even what seems to be 48 hours just trying to get through it. It was making a toll on both my writing career and my job, and it had to stop.**

**I'm proud to say that the lithium hasn't taken away any of my creativity (though ideas will take a little longer to come up with) and I managed to write this just fine, and writing 3,000 words felt like it took nothing out of me at all.**

**After my long hiatus, I truly feel like I can be more productive with my work now, and I can definitely work on stories such as Fragile Angels again with very little issues. I'm glad I made the right choice in trying lithium and a different anti-depressant, and it's done wonders for me.**

**I have another oneshot that needs to get done, and then I will work on Fragile Angels again. Thank you for being patient and wonderful.**

It's been 48 hours since I've been here. 48 hours translates to two days. It translates to so many minutes I could've spent with my friends. So many minutes I could've spent doing something productive. So many minutes I could've spent bettering my life. But I couldn't better my life, because as the nurses around me told me, I was "ill". My mind was seeping of mercury. It was making me not function like a normal hedgehog. Like a normal person who would've rather spent these 48 hours with someone else. With Shadow.

They kept telling me that my brain was sick. That I needed to stitch it up. Stitch it up like my wrist that still smells of the fresh paint of blood. They wanted to cut one side of my brain smaller so I could function better. Stab my brain with a lobotomy pickax. They told me everything, and I didn't believe in anything they told me.

I was still normal, I told myself. Still able to think clearly. But they said I was lying. But I couldn't even find out the definition of a lie anymore.

I could be anywhere else but here right now, making my eye sockets stare at something else than the pale blue wall that promised me I would get better. But right now I wished my eyes would be ripped out of those sockets, so I could never see the blandness in this life. The darkness that coated everything.

But no, I was in this hospital, with so many wires hooked up to me, latched onto me so they could suck me of all of my fluids, telling me that I had to get my blood levels right and stable again. That the sickness had to go away before I was admitted into a psychiatric facility. A place for a bunch of loons and doctors who wrote you prescriptions without giving a second thought or even a second look in your face, realizing you were real and not a phantom in their daydreams.

My hands were bloodied and in gauze. I don't remember what I did to it.

I don't remember anything, to be honest.

I just knew that I was feeling really good one minute, believing that I was on top of the world, that I was a god among hedgehogs and men, and suddenly, there was this black inescapable hellish pit that I could never dare to escape. It consumed in black hellfire. It continued to tear away at my bones and my flesh and my eyes and I was here, in this hospital, with Satan's henchmen looking over me and checking on me and making sure I wouldn't escape from their little cage that I was in, like an abandoned, shaggy, sheltered dog that pisses in it and they don't bother cleaning it up.

Sick. Illness. They told me that many times. That I was sick with something. But what? I never knew. I simply knew that I dragged my feet when I walked some days, and walked with a stride and a jubilant smile on others. Sometimes the colors of the hospitals, the light baby cornflower blue and the blinding white, it was much more vivid in my vision. And that everything seemed to burst in taste, color, smell, all my senses were much more vibrant and alive, while other days everything was dead and had nothing to prove to me that I was alive too. The hospital food would taste much more blander than what it was. My eyes feel dulled and decayed. Music doesn't sound as good in my ears, in fact it was barely tolerable above a whisper. And my emotions, they were blunt and white. I couldn't show him how much I loved him. I couldn't tell him that I would strive to get better for him, that everything will be okay, because I was normal, a normal hedgehog who could feel love like everyone else.

But even my heart felt like porcelain. It shattered easily too. And I knew that he wouldn't take these news easily, that I was more ill than before, that I had to stay in this shitty hospital for more than 48 hours, more time I could've spent dreaming of him and loving him, but I was in here, with the liquid pouches going inside me, worrying that that they were venom, that I was slowly going to die a painful death.

I could feel it being inserted in my body, with its needle fangs, scaring a hole inside me, ready to lick up all the blood inside me…

I wasn't sure why I was here. I never was given that answer except that I was ill, sick, alone, and I wanted Shadow here more than anything than these demons with their long black licorice fingernails and their teeth shining like cellophane and their eyes as blank as an empty page. They told me I could never leave, and I could never say a word to anyone, because I was deemed insane. The mercury continued to be lapped up by my brain, and the silver sea was beginning to leak into everything.

They told me I wasn't myself, but I didn't even know who I was. I looked at my face in the mirror and it looked…different. My muzzle was bruised, and my green eyes were lifeless and filled with remorse. I could feel the weight of this hospital room beginning to crush my bones, the caring and the concern too much for my body to handle.

I didn't deserve to be cared for.

It was the mercury telling me so, because otherwise I wouldn't believe that. As I sat dazed on the hospital bed, the pale walls beginning to surround me, the flowers given to me by my friends and co-workers were beginning to smell a pungent odor, they were beginning to bleed paint all over the picture of my vision. They were too colorful. They were too bright. I had to get rid of them. I had to make them die.

My hands reached for them, and even with the venom pouch attached to one of my arms, I made it rise and then plunge into the checkered floor.

The vase was soon scattered, in cut glass of crystal that threatened to make anyone's hand and feet scarred and broken. The nurses told me I was irrational. They said I was psychotic. I don't even know what that means right now. Not at this moment.

They gave me a green liquid to drink. It was dark, the color of my pupils, ready to stare into me, telling me that I wasn't right, and it had to be corrected, that my brain needed the right chemicals to function and this drink was the one answer to a calm, peaceful sleep, the most I would ever get in God knows how many months. They shoved the liquid inside me with their many eye-colored fingernails and within minutes, I fell back into that Hell again. The quiet Hell that was reserved for much more sinister followers of Satan, such as Hitler, such as Stalin, where everything was nothing but a chasm that wanted to drain me of this world and into the demon's little fantasies about me being sick and ill that I had to stay here for 48 hours.

48 hours I honestly could've spent with Shadow, and I was here, nothing but a plastic shrunken body that was ready to wilt under the burning hospital lights. The fever was running at 103 degrees, and they gave me something while I wasn't looking. They said Tylenol, but I knew it would kill me even further.

I was slowly dying here. Other than the nameless friends who looked like black silhouettes, black spray painted phantoms, I had no one to comfort me, because Shadow was busy doing missions. He said he had no time for me here. He said he wasn't going to stand for any more of my "dramatic acts", even if I didn't know what those acts were or why they were so dramatic in the first place.

I slept. The Thorazine took me to a different world, where people slept dreamlessly and the nurses' faces were made of chocolate. It was about time for Easter to get here. I could possibly eat them like rabbits with ears that stretched across the horizon of heaven. Maybe God and Jesus were both rabbits. That explains why Easter was dominated by egg-laying, chocolate-skinned rabbits whose insides were either peanut butter or nougat. The irrationality again. It continued to take over my brainflesh.

—

Morning came, and I was still dull, still a bulb that couldn't bloom under these blinding lights. The nurses put my flowers in another vase and put them far away from me, but they were beginning to rot away, and I could imagine maggots eating at their stems and petals.

"You have a visitor today, Mr. Sonic."

Was that really my name? My identity seemed to melt as my mind began to drown under the rage of the silver sea, and I tried to reach for the surface, but slowly, I was sinking deeper to the bottom, back to that quiet Hell.

Was I as bad as Hitler? As sick as Dahmer? As much of a liar as these politicians on my TV today, promising the youth a bright future when they made them into their own little toy soldiers to play with?

I wondered. My hands still were singed upon the fires of the razor blade I played with. I don't know why I thought of suicide. I thought everything was fine. Everything _was_ fine. I wasn't depressed. I wasn't willing to kill myself for myself, to make this sadness go away.

It ate away at everything. My heart was chewed up and torn from all the depression inside me. It ate it like an apple, and it continued to be the worm that burrowed a hole through all my organs, eating them from the inside out.

The only way I could kill it was to kill myself.

Before I could think about it anymore, my visitor was Shadow, his face full of scorn and annoyance at my illness.

It was all my fault, wasn't it, that I was this way?

I looked at my hands, dried with a fresh coat of blood, the stitches closing up the door to my wrists' veins and arteries that kept me alive, and as he stared at me, his face relaxed and he said that maybe, it wasn't my fault, but I really was sick with something. A disorder. He looked it up. It was called bipolar.

"Apparently lithium can help with it. And it can save your life. And…even though you may not think it, I believe that your health is much more important than a passing mood that makes you extremely happy. There's a lot of things in life that can make you feel that way than the shit in your brain."

Like?

"Me, Sonic. Of course you know that's important. And I don't want to talk to you, anymore, until you go through this psychiatric shit and actually get help for it. I'm not going to watch and see you die anymore. I would rather not acknowledge you than to see someone I…really care about die. Either you accept this help or I'm…not going to bother returning your calls, or even live with you. I will leave, as everything that was rational and sane about your life left you."

I was still rational. Still sane. I wasn't crazy.

"You aren't crazy, but you also are not rational. You just picked up that vase of flowers and just threw it on the ground because you said their smell was becoming overwhelming. Is there anything rational about that? You could've just asked the nurses to put it somewhere else. For Christ's sake, Sonic…"

No, that wasn't rational, but have everything so vivid and the odors taking over your line of thought that you decide to do something stupid like that. They're even saying I might be schizophrenic. Do you want to stick around with someone who hears voices in his head, who believes in these delusions and shit? Why are you still with me? Why are you continuing to subject yourself into this torture?

"I don't know. Even I don't know that. But I feel like you're worth it once you admit there's a problem with you."

And go into a mental hospital? And why? I could be doing way better things with my time, you know that. Everyone knows that.

"And what you constitute as a way better use for your time was killing yourself? Sonic, I…wished you would…you would…"

I would what?

"Just accept your damn treatment!" he shouted, his face as red as his quill marks. "You know why you're here. You know why you have to go into the mental hospital. Just accept you have issues. Stop being so fucking clueless about everything! You will get better, otherwise I'm having nothing to do with you. We'll be through, and you will be alone for the rest of your fucking life! Do you want that Sonic? Do you want absolutely no one helping you with this disease? Absolutely no one who will give you the time of day to listen to your fucking problems? Because I won't. It's the same shit all the time, Sonic. That you're sad, that you feel alone, that you can't let this sadness drain out of you. But suicide wasn't the answer. It never was the answer. And you're going to have to put that in your head too, because if you actually wanted to spend more time with me, then you should spend as less time in the hospital you can just accepting you have these…issues. You're lucky you're living in an age where these disorders are actually treatable and understood, otherwise I would've left you a long time ago."

And that was the reason I was spending 50 hours in here. Because I absolutely couldn't stand the fate of him leaving.

I shifted from the extremes of happiness and the extremes of sorrow. One minute I felt like I was born to do something special for the world, that I'm able to think of these beautiful ideas that could change everything, that I truly was a hedgehog after all that had everything in his life put together and I was happy with everything and I couldn't wish for another mood in the world, and then I sink further into the depths of my mercury, that I suddenly wanted to die. That I suddenly hate every fiber of my being. That guns and knives and hooks and pills suddenly look much more enticing, and I indulge in them once in a while, because I could.

My fingers looked like fat worms. I tried to put them around Shadow's hand, but he wouldn't let me.

He said he will see me in the psychiatric facility, that he couldn't stand talking to me for another minute.

Shadow.

"No. I can't do it."

And why not?

"Because…" he paused. "Just…you're sick. I know the nurses have been telling you that all day, but you are. You need to recover from this. And I can't face the pain of you doing this shit all the time. You…acting like nothing in your life could ever go wrong, that you drink and drink and drink until the pain inside you burns away, and you suddenly having these damn fancies of suicide. Why would you go through that? Why would you do that to yourself? You used to been so full of promise, Sonic. I respected you. But now…you're lying on this hospital bed, your thoughts never connecting together, you looking like a doll with button eyes with a fixed smile on your face even though your threads are torn and white blood is puffing through. You can never spend time with me anymore. You could've spent those 48 hours with me. You could've spent time with me when you were thinking of killing yourself. But you're selfish. Always it's about you. You never tell me anything. Everything is a damn secret with you."

I had to keep secrets. That's why I didn't tell him I was in here until the rumor flew that I attempted suicide.

I just told them I cut myself on a machine and fell down the stairs. Falling down the stairs was always the tell-all excuse for self-abuse.

"No it isn't, Sonic. Everyone knows what's going on. You can't hide those stitches on your wrists and tell me you fell down the stairs. It's asinine for you to think you can keep a secret of this mental illness with everyone."

I wasn't bipolar. This was just a rough time in my life, that was all.

I never attempted suicide except for this one lone incident.

"That's a lie."

I never drank until everything seemed to all go to Hell.

"That's a lie too, Sonic."

I never felt this lonely until you came along.

"Are you trying to pin the blame on me?"

No.

"Either way it isn't going to work."

The demons came in again, with their curled teeth and their cindered nails. They told me visiting hours were over. And Shadow punched the baby blue walls until there was a bruise on it. And I simply sighed and gazed at my wrists again.

They looked like little galaxies to me.

—

It was time to leave. I spent 56 hours in this hospital. Hours I could've spent on my life. But it was time to get checked in at a mental hospital. They said I had to spend at least 72 hours in there. So there's more hours I would never get back.

The sun was still black to me. The nurses seemed to be blinded by it but I wasn't. It never shined bright enough for me. I often had to wonder if I should get up in the morning because the blanket I was diving into was so much darker, and I liked the darkness. All my bones were turned to dust and my eyes were often wet with tears, because nothing looked like the yellow golden sun would ever rise up to me again. That I would forever be inside this darkness, that the mercury sea would continue to feed me with insanity, that I would continue to drown and never see the surface again. Never see the pink amber skies, never see the stars that would shine so bright for me.

Forever I drowned in this mental illness, that the only way out was making my wrists bleed all my life. I was sick of pills and therapy. I often imagined them as candy that doctors gave out too willingly. I often thought of what the nurses were talking about prescribing me, that the lithium was a white sand that would somehow make everything go away, at the sacrifice of me being crazy enough to put a damn metal in my body.

"Everything will get better from here on out, Sonic. We promise you. Soon you will look at this moment and wonder why you even thought of suicide at all."

My bathtub was red. I could never forget that moment. I could see it was a bloody sea, that I was ready to die, that I was ready to accept my fate as a martyr, a sacrifice to the gods.

I lifted my bags and hospital supplies. I looked at the flowers as they sat on the nurses' desk, their colors bleeding into the picture again. They looked alive at that moment, as the sun reached for it and picked it up with its golden hands. They proudly looked at me, with their yellow tongues flickering out of their petals, that this was a kiss from God, that truly, everything was going to be okay. That with every black chasm, there was a cliff that held towns and wonders and beautiful people and beautiful things, and if I let my wrist continue to bleed and never dialed 911, I would miss out on life's fragile beauties, that looked so difficult to see once your vision was muddled, once the chasm looked so big and so inviting.

I looked at the hole in the wall.

And I knew that getting better was going to be worth it. Just for one hedgehog who cared too much.

I could spend more 48 hours with him, spend another 56 hours with him, maybe even another 72 hours, once the mercury was drained away and was no longer such a frightening ocean, threatening to swallow me with its unstable shores.

I was ready to get better.

For him.

For us.


	2. Patient Observation

It was raining when I left the hospital. The physical wounds were left to dry in the sun, hoping they would soon be recovered, that my wrists no longer look as bruised and black like the small cavern inside my mouth, as I tried to swallow in all the remaining sunshine I could get before the rain drowned out my desires. It was gray, as gray as the silver sea inside my head, and the rain continued to pelt the car, as the windshield wipers never seemed to wipe enough away on the sleeve of the car. The rain beckoned and foretold that the first night in the mental hospital was going to be dreary, boring, and I would just be left with staring at the scars, wondering how I got them still. Shadow told me I attempted suicide, but I couldn't believe him. I couldn't even believe in myself, that I admitted I tried to cut out the blood in my body. I still felt I was okay, normal, happy, but if I was happy, none of these scars would be on me. My flesh would be free, pure and blue, like the ocean far off from here. But everyone was leaving the beach today, it seemed like. The storm was ruining everyone's fun. It was time to run for home.

Oh how I wished I could do the same thing.

The storm was ruining my life, and I just wanted to go home and be under my covers, never crawling out underneath them again. The black sun continued to shine so ominously for me. Never have I once smelled the real sunshine, felt it on my face. It's been far too long since I've felt any kind of solace, especially with this low I was going through. It's been months, and I was still as bare as a skeleton, my emotions feeling so blunt and lifeless. The color was sucked out of the world. I swear that even the police officer had a gray face and gray hands while the car was black, another ominous black I had to look out for from sucking my soul right from my body like a damn straw.

I felt gray too. I wasn't blue anymore. Everything was taken away from me in this instant as I sat on the back seat, holding my head, trying to contain the most massive headache I had in a long time. I wanted to go to sleep again, but I could never sleep in a car.

He tried to small talk me while we drove there, but I said nothing. I couldn't think of anything to say, honest. I mostly stuck my fingers in my wounds, wondering how long it would take for me to take the stitches out of my wrist. They felt like barbed wire underneath my skin. And I wanted it out. I wanted to bleed again. I wanted to see if there were any bones left in my wrist. I felt like it was nothing but an amorphous creature, claiming to be a part of me. The creature had to come out. I had to make the wrist bleed again so I could replace the membranes with bones.

"Are you trying to hurt yourself again?"

I didn't know. I simply thought my wrist was something different. Not a part of me.

I had that question about several parts in my body. That my eyes belonged to someone else. Look how dirty and sullen they were. They were ripped from someone else's socket and put into my own. Possibly from my father. My father was also the victim of the eye thief. He stole my mother's eyes too.

The baggage never seemed enough. What was I going to need in this damned place? I had toothpaste and a brush and some clothes and some other shit that I just wanted to get through once and then throw it away and never use it again. I was sick of brushing my quills over and over, every day. I wanted to do it once and never worry about it again. Showering and all the other basic necessities felt more like chores than actual necessities. I haven't eaten anything before I was in the hospital and was forced to eat (they thought I was anorexic, but no, just the mania, the constant worry about my condition, it made my bones stick out, ready to be ripped from my body), and I was also forced to sleep too, as there was simply nothing to do in the hospital but stare at the wall and hope you don't suddenly die.

I was even parched too. I drank nothing but coffee and vodka. They were my liquid lunches for the day. And I would drink and eat nothing else.

Shadow often told me of how I wasn't dead already from the lack of nutrition, and I often wondered too, and wouldn't mind if I suddenly succumbed from these constant liquid foods. The vodka promised me to make everything, even my nightmares and my inner pain, go away and be sucked into my subconscious, but as Shadow told me, it did nothing but made my problems worse.

If it made my problems worse, then why was I still drinking it by gallons and pints? I even had a flask around my neck before I came in the hospital. Of course, when they saw it and I was asleep, they promptly threw it away and I never saw it again. They said it was for the best, but at this point, I didn't even know what was best for me anymore.

The streetlights even felt gray in my vision. Green, red, and yellow all meant the same thing to me. All of them meant to go down the road as quick as you could and keep driving until you reached your end. I felt that way a lot, that I was just driving further and further into my demise, that eventually, I would put a bullet in my head and have everyone cry at my funeral and what have you. Tears didn't even made me want to shed tears for my friends. I no longer cared that they cared about me. I just wanted to be gone from this Earth, into sweet darkness, where I wouldn't have to deal with this turmoil anymore. I never smoked a damn cigarette in my life and never cared to, but my hands were beginning to tremor like an earthquake was in my insides, and I asked the officer for a smoke. I flicked the lighter on and covered the cigarette with my hand, but I burnt myself when the cinder got too close and burnt a hole in my gloved fingers. Now there was something as black as my bruises, black as my wrists. A hole that threatened to suck all of my life away. And it was inside my hand. The universe was expanding before my very eyes. I was a part of it, but I threatened to no longer be a part of it to God. But God doesn't even exist, right? If my eyes were swollen and my skin was yellow and the bruises were the purple splatters to my ugly canvas, then there was no God. Because I used to be happy once. A very long time ago.

I don't remember what it took to ruin my life. I remembered I was with Shadow at the beginning of fall several years ago, and we did so many things together that we often complemented each other. I was the red in Shadow's quills, and he was the cream-colored arms and chest for me. We blended each other, wonderful colors on God's lovely canvas. I remembered we had a pumpkin spice coffee that was always so comforting to me when the leaves were beginning to make their fall from heaven to the earth, and I asked him, I asked him of a question that was in my mind since we met.

"I don't know if I can do that, Sonic. I still have a lot to do in this city. I still…have some missions I need to accomplish."

What kind of missions? He never told me, not even to this day.

"I'm sorry Sonic, but maybe we can…do something else about this."

I told him we couldn't. That I loved him a lot. That he made me so happy and I never could imagine myself not lying in the same bed next to him, listening to his heartbeat, listening to his breath as it slowly timbered from him, that I couldn't imagine not watching every Santa Monica sunrise on the beach and every sunset and we could eat at lovely places and we could even do something as simple as feed the birds next to the park and just look at how ridiculous they were over bread crumbs and we could laugh together and hold hands and never want to leave each other at this very moment and we would kiss and our hearts would meet in our chests and we would shout and sing in joy and just God going over these memories right now I want to cry because none of that is happening anymore.

I loved Shadow. So much. But then I turned into this wretched monster. This thing that is never happy for anything or anyone. I wasn't even happy when Shadow walked in the same room, because he was beginning to be sick of my illness. He was getting sick from my sickness. I thought that I was destroying and shredding everything in my life, that soon I would never see Shadow again, that our love would be broken and shattered and heavy and gone, and I would be left with no one in my life. My father, the eye thief, died years ago too, but I never cared even though he gave me these eyes. My mother never understood me but she soon died too. I went to her funeral, but I only cried for one day. After that, my life was normal and not shaken at all from her death. But could Shadow deal with me dying? Me burning myself into ashes, cremating myself? I knew Shadow still loved me. He still loved me so. And I wanted to get him to love me like he used to again. I wanted to hold his hands tenderly again. I wanted to kiss him again like I used to. But our love was cremated too. I sometimes thought I could never revive it, as long as this mercury sea was inside me. It continued to uphold me, it continued to shake me and beat me and kill me slowly with its ravenous tongue and its ravenous eyes. I couldn't make the phoenix hatch from its ashes and give life with its sparkling flames. And I wished that phoenixes existed, so I could know that being revived, being rebirthed from these horrible circumstances, it could happen, and I was prepared to be revived.

But I still felt cold. I still felt gray and destroyed inside. I knew even my heart was cold, solid ice, that my fingers would be pricked even holding it, even carrying it in my sleeves.

I wasn't sure if even this entire mental hospital visit was going to do anything.

And when I spoke of it again, I was here. The police officer told me the hospital was actually a nice facility with caring people who all wanted to see me get better. But I knew they were always full of ignorant doctors and nurses who simply thought caring was part of the job and not at all genuine. He helped me with my bags and as I walked in the rain, I could feel my wrists beginning to throb, feeling as if the amorphous being was going to jump from my socket and begin to crawl all over the place. I could see the bruise underneath it was its own solid black eye pupil.

The nurses welcomed me. They told me they would treat my bipolar. They say that I am on the road of recovery, but I didn't believe them. I thought I was slowly on my downward spiral, until I would reach the depths of Hell. The black fire beginning to intoxicate my soul. They gave me my room, they made me wear a hospital gown for the first night, I simply lied on my bed, listening to all the screams and the clamor of the other patients. They all looked like men reaching their mid-life crises, that their wives threatened to leave them and they were thinking of committing suicide.

If only they had a life like me, they wouldn't last one second with my mind, with this bipolar storm inside my head. They would be dead if they lived like me.

—

The hours droned on. I was often left in the dayroom of the hospital with nothing to do except staring at the yellow walls that reminded me of the sun that I used to love and admire so much, before it was painted a tarnishing black. I sat on the green couch, watching as the other patients played pool, with their gray beards lined with dribbling snot, as the man often mumbled beneath his breath that he was the ruler of the galaxies and he didn't need to be in here. The others simply nodded and continued to stare at the air, how thin it was, how vaporous it was, it simply looked like another man to them. The air could take someone else's dead body and make them alive again, but they weren't conscious, they didn't at all had any desires or notable features in their personalities. They were simply empty masks, their eyes with holes cut in them with scissors, and their sagging corpsed face would melt every time they talked. They simply stared at the other patients who had the eyes that could pull apart the silver strings of oxygen and determine that they were speaking to their dead father, their wife, their uncle. With my thieved eyes I couldn't see anything, except the bruises, the cuts, the injuries I held while I sat here.

They were supposed to be observing me, they said. They were supposed to notice if I did any strange behaviors, anything that could be solved with the pop of a candy pill, filled with sugar and iodide. Even with the walls so bright, with so many comforting pictures of trees swaying in the breeze and people fishing on the Santa Monica shores, I still saw everything as monochrome, as dead as the men's souls in this hospital. God was entirely a black and white person I thought to myself. He never saw blood when it was shed from someone. He never saw my body be ripe and torn with flies, sucking all my sanity out of me. Even though I was here in this mental hospital, I still felt dead, I still felt like my depression, my lows, they would be attached to my body and draining me for the rest of my life. I thought of the seat I was in right now as the same one in a waiting room, that I was waiting for this quack doctor to come up with something that could save my life, something that would make me into a happier hedgehog, the one I used to know before I thought of all these illish things. When I knew Shadow much better than I did now, who told me that he felt so much joy with me, even if his life also didn't contain the fruits of an enthusiastic living, with all the lavish things I would see in my past lovers' bedrooms, their gold and silk and ivory. But Shadow was simply simple. He never thought of those luxuries as much of anything. As long as he had a pack of cigarettes, his bed, and me, he was happy.

But I knew he was slowly falling out of love with me. That he no longer wanted to deal with my wretched brain. He said he was going to leave me if I didn't do anything with my bipolar. And I knew every time he would leave me and shut the door, my soul felt a little bit shattered. I couldn't imagine him leaving me for good.

But even as I continued to sit, waiting for my fate to unfold before me, I still didn't have much hope. I didn't have much hope for anything. I imagined that the medicine wouldn't work, and would in fact make me feel worse. My heart would be torn with their bladed cyanide. They said lithium could work for me, but I thought of that as poison. The same hemlock prescribed to Juliet when she drank it and soon could no longer feel her eyes move or her tongue saying any more romantic words to Romeo. It made her body quiver and shut down. And I knew I would have the same fate. My eyes, they were sore and red! My arms could never move much more than a few inches away from me, as I hoped the beings would be launched off my body and into another world where they didn't seep of sadness.

The nurses were telling me that I as delusional as the rest of the men here. But I didn't believe it. If I believed them to be true, then they weren't delusions to me. There were still things I questioned of myself that I thought I was crazy to believe in, but the keyword was "questioned". These fantasies in my head, they seemed true and real. I often could see the words off the magazines in the table next to me fly off the pages, wondering to the next sky, the next air that didn't smell so fetid of dead people. That didn't carry the sounds of screams and yells and men who believed in their fate that they would soon drown in Hell. Sounds familiar? It does to me.

Everyone was dead here. They all couldn't stand reality, so they made up their own fantasies. And I was one of them. I tried to come up with excuses as to why I was sick. That someone poisoned me. Controlled me to want to attempt suicide. That I would never do such a thing to myself, that I passed out and another personality of mine wanted to die under the righteous blades of Truth. The nurses have told me many times that I did it, I tried to kill myself, I tried to murder myself, but I couldn't think of it. It wouldn't be inserted in my head. The puzzle piece didn't fit. It was the wrong size, the wrong shape.

They were going to begin to take me to my doctor and prescribe some medication. I knew it wouldn't do anything to help, but I played along.

"Dr. Marsh will come here tomorrow, do an analysis, then prescribe something to help. And we will go over your medications and help you understand your treatment. And if your medicine isn't working, please tell us and the doctor. And we'll make a switch to something that can still help you regain control of your life."

I sat in the chair, motionless, as still as a stone, my eyes like onyx, as I continued to gaze at the world beyond me. Liars. Perpetrators. I knew no one really wanted to help me. They wanted me to suffer even more. I could still smell the corpses as they lined the air in the hospital, as the black sun was beginning to drown down in the earth and be replaced with a million and one candles that are supposed to celebrate the deceased.

I was one of them. Among the dead. I could never imagine myself finding joy in anything in this world ever again. The world was glazed with a black ink brush. I could see the world decaying slowly, the men's faces melting and being further peeled off their faces every second. I suddenly wanted to cry. I knew this was a breakdown, that I couldn't see the reality of the world, the polished yellow paint before my eyes that shined like eggshells, and I could never see the true loveliness of the world. The oxidizing beauty of everything, intoxicating me much more than the rich flames of Hell.

I COULD BREATHE AGAIN, THIS FRESH AIR THAT WAS GIVEN TO ME BY THE GREEK GODS! AND I THOUGHT I WOULD BE TORMENTED, SURRENDERING MYSELF TO THE MONOCHROME, THE WHISPERS OF THE MEN AS THEY TOLD EACH OTHER THAT I WAS INSANE! BUT I KNEW THAT WHILE I WAS CRAZY, THIS WAS A GOOD CRAZY! A MAD-GENIUS CRAZY!

The ocean was shallow and I lied in it for so long. The stars bladed through my ceiling, which looked like a light blue canvas that would soon go up in the star's smoldering flames, and I could see vividness, attractiveness, the songs the nurses' sang sounded like the very same voices the sirens would sing in Odysseus' travels to his home and they were so beautiful, so alive, and I wanted to drink it all in, the lovely world that was given birth by…

Me.

I am God. I am the destroyer, the shaker of people, and I am the birther, the wrought of death, as I created all these lovely things, and I remind people that life surely was to live for. Mankind is prone to suicide, but with me, with my color bursting at my fingertips, with my lips reviving the valor of anyone I kiss, and no one was going to attempt suicide. Not even me.

I could feel the world quaking underneath my feet. I could feel the galaxies in my wrists beginning to swirl around me, telling me of other universes I could give shape to. Space was so vast, so huge, and I had to take care of everything. Whenever I sneezed, a new planet was born. Every time I cut a fine line of dotted red flesh, there was a new world flowing in my veins. And you couldn't swim in it until I truly bled it out of me.

The men all looked at me, telling me I was rambling, that I was going on about Greek gods and universes and cutting, but I told them that I was thinking of an ingenious plan to get out of the hospital. That I was ready to come out of here, because everything was okay, I was truly fine and happy and livid as the sprouts of cilantro began to grow from my hands, my wrists, and my body and legs. I was Life itself. I could cure anyone and anything of any trouble. I was Jesus. I was the Newly Formed Christ.

I ripped the cilantro from my wrist and it began to bleed a fine red river, as I could see a hole beginning to suck me inside into its dark little cave, its sanctum where I belonged, as I had the flesh of the gods, and I could make a home in my heart and my own veins.

I don't remember what happened after that. I passed out I think. I was blessed with the black void again, as the Thorazine began to flow in my veins like fine wine.

They were telling me I tried to attempt suicide again.

But I was simply uncovering the secrets of my body, that I could give life to everything as long as I breathed.

When I woke up, I had new stitches on my wrist. The hole was sealed up again. My home was gone, and I never knew why. I never knew what caused those bitches to want to close it up again.

I wished I saw phantomly white bones inside it. I often thought I had no bones at all in my body, but I was held up by planks, the very same ones that were used to crucify Christ.

This hospital was crucifying me. I was the martyr that was supposed to forgive everyone of their sins. I could feel them shoving the barbed wire inside me, the pills, the needles and the restraints.

And I thought I liked the abuse. That I wanted it more.

Just because you were manic it didn't mean you still didn't want to burn out and fade away.

"Sonic, Dr. Marsh would like to see you now."

I went inside, as the smell of Pine-Sol was beginning to overwhelm my nostrils. The man smiled at me, and I thought I could see crooked, sharp and metal white teeth, ready to devour me.


	3. Pill Induced Slumber

"So, tell me, what's getting underneath your skin?"

I wished I could tell him. I could feel so many things crawling underneath my skin, biting at my veins. But I felt like they had to remain a secret. They said I would die if I told anyone about my suffering, about me wondering the day when Shadow would leave. I could see it and feel it and smell it. The senses were so bright, so powerful, that I could feel anything that was in my mind. It was real. And they said I was delusional when these things seemed so real to me. The actuality of how close I was to diving further into the sea.

I was in the darkest corners of it now.

Even I didn't know what was wrong with me. Why would I believe him now that things would get better if I couldn't diagnose my problems?

Bipolar. It didn't feel like that. It felt like just plain misery. And you couldn't diagnose someone with the DSM-IV by just stating he was miserable. But my hands, all wrapped up in gauze, hiding everything, my heart hammering out such a strong beat, my eyes no longer containing that spark that made me keep going even when everything was casted in shadows, the world's phantoms beginning to grow and overpower me with their long thick black claws.

He still said I denied everything. That I attempted suicide. But I thought it really wasn't a suicide. It was trying to live again. Living my old life again after dying. I could see God's face as I looked at the man, and I knew that a little bit of God was in everyone, but I imagined him that he wanted to control my life, with his medication that were small little pieces of machines, little radios that told the government of what was going on inside me.

The barbed wire was much bigger now. Ever since I tried to rip out those plants from my body. I wasn't even sure where they came from. I wasn't even sure what I was thinking when it happened. The doctor said I was hallucinating. But I couldn't think of that. These things were true and had flesh and bones. They not at all were like spirits.

"Why did you cut your wrists again? Were you thinking of suicide? What made you want to do that?"

I didn't even realize it was suicide.

I thought it was simply going into another space and time, inside my body. The home was my sanctuary, a place my blood cells built to worship me. The god that could see everything. And as the stars were beginning to simmer in the sky, I thought I could simply pick them gingerly with my burnt fingers and just stab the doctor and get out of here. Sometimes I felt like I would rather be in prison. But I would forever be labeled as insane. Mentally unwell. Sick. A fucker. A bastard. The only ones who wanted to deal with me were people hired by the government to take care of me. But I knew they never wanted to cure me. They just wanted my money. Make me bleed for more cash. As if I wasn't failing enough in my job already.

"I see."

Of course you don't. No one could see. Only I can. Because I have the godlike eyes to see and scan everything.

"Sonic, do you think you can benefit from taking medication?"

No, of course not. They were only disgusting little creatures you had to put inside you to rot your insides and to make yourself feel like everything was okay when it really wasn't. I didn't want to insert maggots in my soul. I was decaying enough, especially with all the dead bodies that were inside the hospital.

"Have you ever heard of a medication called Trileptal?"

What an awful name for a medication.

I wasn't interested in even touching it. It smelled of shit. Those little white tablets squirmed and wriggled. I could already feel I was right. They were born from the flies' wombs and were inserted with sugar and caffeine and cyanide.

I would rather have a cigarette. I still didn't think too nicely of smoking, but I felt my hands quaking. I needed to have something to calm me. And not Xanax. I heard of terrible things about Xanax. How everyone who took it was instantly a drooling mess on the couch.

There was already a man who sat on the couch all day, sleeping his woes away. He was taking Xanax; otherwise he would be screaming and crying like a baby about everything in life.

Life was making me sick. Not my mental illness. I often imagined myself in a completely different world, a black world, where I could no longer talk to anyone, not go to work anymore, not even be met with sadness and despair. But be left with my ideas, my little sparks of imagination, and never have to deal with reality ever again. And I would rather have that then this constant sorrow, as I began to try to keep my head above the surface, the choppy waves filling my mouth and lungs with water. I coughed, I gagged, and I wished there was a way I could get out of this torment for good. The mercury sea was beginning to kill me. It was a murderer. It simply wanted my heart to sell to the black market. But it already belonged to Shadow. I couldn't imagine giving it to anyone else.

"You have to take your medication; otherwise you're in here for a long time Sonic. Did you know that?"

Of course I knew. But I never seemed to care about that. I was always destined to be here. I was always sick, always poor. Shadow could prove to me that I was always inside the silver sea that I never seemed to want to go anywhere but drown in my misery. I never had the money to do anything. I was losing my job. They told me if I didn't get treatment I would be fired. And I knew when I would leave my clerk job they would never really miss me. They would claim to, but I can see their lies in their eyes. And the job was easy. Just about anybody could do it.

All I did was stamp some information on checks. I never did anything else. It was dull, but it gave me plenty of time to think. I often thought of so many things, my head as fluent as a river. I often thought of it like the river of Styx. Because I often thought that it was a sin to be thinking so much and having all your ideas connect together like the little strings I was seeing in the hospital, tying them up into a little ribbon, a little shoelace. It had so many branches, so many ways to get these wondrous ideas, these epiphanies, this feeling inside you that you were drinking mead along the other gods. I often thought so hard that I thought my brain would shatter like glass. I often didn't speak to my "clients", because I was too busy in my head, trying to make sense of it. But I felt like I was a genius with that head so high up in the stars. That I could solve any problem in the world, I could get a doctorate in anything I wanted, I could do so much while only applying very little of myself.

But the mania, the green river it was, it soon overflowed. I soon couldn't do my job. I was often distracted by my thoughts. I would leave my chair and walk, walking and walking and walking. Thinking of so many problems in the world that I could solve with my genius mind that was stabbed with God's insight. I soon claimed that I didn't need to go to work because the gods were watching me and they wanted me to have a better job. I applied to so many colleges telling them I wanted a Ph. D in anything I could manage, but they told me that I was too "unstable" to really go into college. That I would be gone in the first semester, and it possibly wasn't the best thing for me right now. They told me I was in a manic high. But it never felt like I could have the world suddenly crush me with its realism. I was invincible to everything. I applied even at the shittier colleges, telling them I wanted to spread my influence over everyone and have them worship me as much as the videotaped gods on my television, but they rejected me there and told me I should get help.

Help. Everyone needed it.

But I thought I surely didn't deserve it.

I was disgusting and pathetic. My father always told me that. Even if I failed in something, he would tell me how much of a loser, a piece of shit I was. But my father was even more fucked up. He had ghostly hands and glowing scarlet wounds and I could pick up the scent of Xanax and cocaine on him sometimes. I could tell that, if I was bipolar, my father was too. And obsessive-compulsive. And a freak.

And the doctor prescribed me with Trileptal and Geodon. I wasn't sure why I even needed an anti-psychotic when I was surely not psychotic at all. All these things were truths. I could feel them as truths. They had the same silky feel as the rest of the air, as the men continued to talk to their imaginary wives. The fact that their wives truly didn't love them was a truth too.

My heart felt cold as I realized it. That maybe no one has ever truly loved me.

And I wondered if it was the same thing with me and Shadow. That he truly didn't love me either. That our whole entire relationship was nothing but a hoax.

That Shadow was lying to me. That he simply wanted me to be gone. That I never had bipolar in the first place. That we were never in love. That he simply led me to be a dismal person. That he gave me this awful disease that was ripping me apart, slowly. The nurses called it paranoia. But more and more it seemed like it was real. An entire day almost passed in the hospital, and Shadow never came to visit me. He said he would. He said he would like to see me get help. But he couldn't see me slowly recover, if I was even doing a little bit of that.

I could still feel the hopelessness ringing inside me, with such a high-pitched screeching sound.

I could still see the stars emanating so brightly on the window, the canvas of the sky being so powerful and emotional to me. The other men didn't appreciate beauty when they saw it. They simply talked their issues with the nurses, saying how they were molested as young boys, that they began to be depressed at the age of 13, they always thought of themselves as worthless and not at all deserving to live. But I simply talked about how I could solve these problems in the world. World hunger? We needed to find a way to make food cheaper, more affordable, and have the government pay the cost of it. Everyone would eat, and eat and eat until they weren't hungry anymore. America was obese because food was so readily available, and the fattening foods were often cheaper and easier to make. Why couldn't we make the healthier food cheaper and put a tax on the sugary shit?

They said it had nothing to do with my treatment.

But I thought it was everything. That when people suffered, I suffered too. My heart was so fragile to the tears of everyone else. But I've been emotionless since my mother died; my father was always such a prick to me.

"What would he do to you?"

My father, the godless heathen. The freak with the plan. The man who couldn't say yes to me. He couldn't even be convinced in the slightest that I was a good hedgehog, that I tried my best. He often said to me that he was never proud of me. He wished I chose that Lutheran religion, but it wasn't my thing. I never really was much a religious fanatic like my father, even if I did call him a godless heathen. I felt like he only wanted to believe in a god because he wanted hope for himself that he would get to a better place than this shithole. But I know my father is in Hell. And I realized I didn't much care for his suffering. He suffered for all his life. It was nothing new to me or him.

Heh. Never say I was good enough. Always told me I should apply myself to school and if I didn't I was a terrible, disgusting, vile child.

He washed his hands often, until they were chafed and they bled.

He often worried about me being so sick that he would catch an illness too.

Our house was always clean.

My mother never knew my father had problems, but she claimed she loved him anyways.

His favorite thing in the world was belts.

I remembered I played hooky from school once, simply because I thought I was too depressed to go, and he whipped me, made my skin sore and a flaming red, cuts being on my body.

And then he would put my wounds in salt water.

And told me if I couldn't deal with it, I wasn't a man.

He went to work at the late hours of the day. When he got back in the morning, I would see him with cuts on his arms. And he once drove his car against a tree. He sustained only minor injuries, but even though I was only 12, I wished he would've died from it. He was in the hospital for several days, and they were happy days. I often sat alone in my room, wondering about how God could give me such an insane man like him as my dad. But I never got an answer back from him. Which I knew that God simply had me here for his own pleasure, making me suffer all these things for his enjoyment, just to see how long it would take for me to break.

I attempted suicide at 14.

I thought of killing myself at 11.

I had a serious attempt that nearly killed me at 16.

My mother often said that I really wasn't sad. Really wasn't depressed. I simply wanted attention. And my father ignored me and focused on his own problems, hearing the water running for what seems to be hours, washing his white, pale hands that looked like they were covered in flour.

I was in a mental hospital like this one at 17, shit. I was out after several days. Doctors thought I was good to go home. I wasn't, because these problems continued to linger inside of me. And that was why I was here now. Because I was…ill.

But yet everything seemed to be so right. I thought it was normal for me to feel this way, because I've felt this way for such a damn long time.

I stayed up a lot when I was a kid. I could never sleep at night. And even at preschool? I threatened suicide. Where do you ever hear of a child thinking of killing himself?

But nothing was taken to help me. My mother simply focused on my father. He was more insane than me. I was just simply on my downward spiral. Like father, like son.

He soon committed suicide.

And I wondered if I was going to be next.

"As long as you admit you have these…problems, Sonic, then you will start getting better. But you keep denying you attempted suicide. You keep denying you have bipolar. Why is that?"

I didn't want to be like my father.

The scars looked so prominent in that room right now. The red ashy marks against the green wallpaper. The checkerboard floor. I felt like I was playing chess, and I was the king that was ready to be check-mated. I could see the other pieces, the bishops and the servants and the queens and the jokers and the hearts and aces.

I was beginning to droop down to my unconscious. I was playing cards with another man, but I didn't much care that I was losing. He had about several aces and jokers while I simply had hearts and spades that wouldn't do much of anything except send me further to my sleep. The spades seemed like they were ready to inject me with Thorazine.

I could barely pay attention. The medication they gave me, I could feel it poisoning me with a hemlock that was making me want to sleep.

"Are you okay? You seem like you're dozing."

My eyes, the stolen eyes from my father, they could barely stay lit up anymore. I could barely keep the eyelids above, the curtains to the bladed light from the stars. I knew it was the Geodon that was making me tired. It was a medicine that often caused extreme drowsiness. The nurses told me if I was tired I could go back to bed, but I felt like I had to stay up, for I was afraid that this hospital would make me into a dead spirit too, that they would cut my legs until I floated in the air without them. That they would take my amorphous arms away from me. And no more wrists. No more scars. I would be left with no arms and no legs. I could sit on the couch, all day, unable to move from my spot. My hands were no longer any use to me. My body felt like it was nothing but a sack of meat, ready to be fried on the pan, the crackling sounds hissing and firing the lamb chop with their white smoky tongues.

I was simply a lamb, ready to be fried by the wolves. I could feel their tongues pushing against me, ripping my bones, breaking my skin, tearing away at everything. They would even tear the silver sea from my mind.

They could take out my eyes too. Put holes in them. Make sure I could never see again.

I could feel myself being sucked into the void, the world of dreams, the world of cotton and candy and paradoxes and doors leading to completely different rooms. I tried to keep myself alert, but the hospital only served caffeine free coffee in the morning. I tried to stare further into the sunny, egg-yolk walls and keep myself focused on the world around me, but I figured there was no more use fighting the pills anymore. I had to go to sleep. I was being sent to a pill-induced slumber. The wriggling maggots of the Trileptal and the little cobalt blue Geodon pills were making me dead and listless. I could feel my invisible wings curling up, like a brown-tinged plant, and I felt like I was a butterfly barely alive, being sent back to its chrysalis. My wings were wet yet again. My eyes were covered with the womb of the universe.

I looked at the stars, wondering what promise they had to entail for me, what I would experience the next day in this frozen hospital, the air feeling like ice around my fingers, and I covered myself with their frail excuse of a blanket.

And I yawned, curled up in my bed, the sheets feeling like wrinkled paper, and I fell asleep.

Dreams and wishes were eternal to me. I had a very strange, very odd dream, that led me to go into a panic in the middle of the night, and I was put in my rightful place, in the rubber room, connected to a straitjacket.

I felt embarrassed, I felt shame tingeing my cheeks when I thought of that moment, how crazy I was. But I was in there, for about six hours, trying to make sense of everything in my bleeding mind.


	4. The Dream

I was away from the world that gave me so much pain to a world that would give me peace and many more silent nights and mornings. I could feel the birds chirping and singing hymns that gave my soul wings, and I felt like I was ready to fly, with how much solace I had inside me. My blood was becoming warm, and so did my heart. I could feel it become one of the stars in the sky, and I gazed at the sky, seeing the cold fiery sun. It was no longer black.

A black sun was unheard of in this world, a sun that was the same color as miserated souls, preparing to devour everything. In fact, the sun was bright. It glowed all over the world. It was a blue sunrise, as blue as me, as warm as I used to be in the past, and it gave a soft turpentine glow to the trees, filled with thin wires that flowed pink and blue lights that looked like LEDs, and the grass, it was so soft, so much like sheep's fleece, and both were white. As white as my father's fingers, as the Trileptal.

The sky was pink, as pink as birth, and I could see that my wrists were healed, no longer with the wires inside of them that were like black fangs sinking into my skin, or the holes and the galaxies. In fact, as I was standing on this strange planet, I felt a strange sense of…happiness overcome me. I was no longer ill. The pills have wrecked the death from my brain. Reversed the dead skin from it, the brain that was white like the grass, like the gums of sick dogs. I was free, on this own planet of mine, with no one else bothering me. I was inside my own little world, and I was truly happy. I could feel butterfly wings growing from my soul, like large elephant ears, and I flapped them as they were wet and wrinkled, and I hoped I could fly again. And to be at peace with myself as I would travel all over the pink sateened sky. Not at all blackened with my self-hatred, the monster inside me as it grew and feasted on my own little self-injuries I sustained from just simply hating myself. But the scars were gone. They disappeared, and I didn't at all thought that my arms were amorphous beings, or my legs would soon disappear underneath me as if they were creaky pieces of plywood against the rough tongue of the wind. I felt at one with everything. The sun continued to shine on me and smile with its orange rusty mouth, looking like rotted out teeth, but I didn't at all mind their appearance. In fact, they felt welcoming.

Instead of death, I could feel the world continuing to give birth underneath me. The world quaked as it breathed in and out, as it continued to breathe with its white mouth, glazed with cinnamon lipstick. The earth was a person, a beautiful woman who was granted with the ability to have life swarm around her body. I could see her world beyond me, and I thought it was such a strange thing to have grass and flowers and trees grow on your film, her breasts as hills and her stomach having a deep crevice in the middle, a hole that went inside her core, her own little version of Hell.

I felt like I was alive for the first time. But as I tried to remember the life I had outside of this dream, and I realized that I was dead too. That this was my reward for killing myself. I was given to a planet that God barely knew about, so he couldn't laugh at me and torture me with his predicaments and his diseases. This earth-woman, she gave me the kiss of life and told me I was a very special creature. I could feel her slowly breathing, her lips so pursed as she kissed yet more creatures, as the sun continued to glare in her eyes. But I knew that she could even kiss the sun and make it go away. The fire didn't bother her at all. I could see her stroking the flames with her long candy-coated fingernails and she soon breathed in all the fire to inside her heart. Her heart gave all the life to the world. And it was blue and as wondrous as the moon she pulled out from her chest, her second heart, and it was a sanctifying gold, the color of bliss, the color of purity. This woman once worshiped God, and she was so beautiful with her kind deeds that he sent her to another side of the universe and gave her own world. And I was a part of it.

Her eyelashes felt like steel wire to me. As curled as burnt leaves. Her eyes were a rich umber, and her face was free of any flaws, as she pet me soothingly, and I could feel myself melting to her very whims, her desires. She could gaze inside me with those eyes, and I felt myself melting, that my soul was stricken with a sense of panic, that there was something wrong with this world, something wrong with me, something wrong with the life I once led, the life I left. I realized that…I left Shadow. I left Shadow, and he wasn't here with me to enjoy this wondrous world with me.

I didn't much care for women, I thought. I wanted Shadow here, to live in this world with me, to realize that I was no longer ill, no longer injured, and I could give him the kind of friend, the kind of partner, that he always wanted. The woman continued to gaze at me, wondering why I wasn't so willing to find where the sun and the moon lied, and I told her I already had someone I loved. I had Shadow. I had him. And I couldn't abandon him. I couldn't forget about him, especially when he and I held hands so much what seemed to be so long ago, having our bodies connect and flow and our hearts beat as one, and the time we spent together, the love we promised to give each other once we kissed. And I died. I left him alone. I left him with the sorrow of his only partner, his only person he loved dearly, die.

I imagined myself alone. That since I committed suicide, me and Shadow were many planets, many galaxies away, and I could pray to God that I didn't truly meant to kill myself after all, but I knew that…he wasn't ever going to come back to me. Especially not in this strange world that I felt he was never a part of.

And my butterfly wings shriveled. I couldn't fly without him.

He was gone. I shoved myself away from him. I basically said I wasn't worthy of him and shut myself out of his life. I could imagine him right now, crying every night, because I decided to die. And even if this land gave me so many promises of a happy beginning, I just couldn't imagine no longer being with Shadow. Touching his quills, feeling warm whenever he was around…promising each other that once I got healthy, once I got better, we would live together again, even get married if everything turned out alright.

I ruined everything. My death promised a new way to live, but now I struggled to make myself go back to my older life, back to me being in the mental hospital, out of this tranquil planet and back to my chaotic mind. I wanted Shadow back in my life. Not this woman. Not this woman who was now asking me why I was so worried, why I wanted to get out of here, why I wasn't attracted to her, she demanded to hear all my excuses, but I simply wanted to die again just to go back to Shadow. Dying back to where I thought dying at first was a good idea.

But here, the woman was very against suicide, and said even if I loved Shadow so much, I shall never see him again, because this was as good as it was going to get. No mental illness. No wars and no problems and not even anything to worry about in my life. But it wasn't worth it without love. Without Shadow. I couldn't stand being here. Alone. The shadows being my only friends. The sun that felt so hot on my fur. Even the moon felt hot, and I was sure that it was also a sun too, as the woman's hearts always blazed inside her.

The trees radically changed in color, from the blue and pink to the black as shadows and the red as blood, and it reminded me of Shadow, and I could feel the cilantro growing in my body again, I could feel the wrist becoming a soot black and the holes beginning to form, I could feel my eyes becoming sore, and I could feel my father being in the same world as I was, suddenly back from the dead and wanting to get revenge on me for being such an utterly disdainful piece of shit, beginning to point his ivory fingers at me, his mouth and teeth the color of candy canes and roses. His green eyes, the stolen eyes he took from my mother such a long time ago, they were a raging sienna, the flames crackling in his soul. He came to me, the whole reality feeling like an illusion, and I could feel his pained and scarred fingers touch me, scratching me, and his teeth becoming orange, as the flames inside him began to flicker and flare, and he told me that I was everything he hated, everything he never wanted in his son, and that he often thought of killing himself everyday just dealing with my reality. My father, the man who never acted like a father. Why did I still call him a father? I never knew. I even felt like we weren't even related, if it wasn't for this sickness cutting though me.

"Who the hell do you think you are telling me you're gay, you shithead? Don't you know you can get killed in other countries being that way? It's a lifestyle that will get you killed one day, Sonic. No one can accept it, and if no one accepts it, I can't either. You don't know how much that hurts me. You don't know what your mother and I go through every day just trying to make you into a good man. And now I can see you have truly failed me. You became a monster. You became as awful as me Sonic, my dear boy. You will be like me. I guarantee it. After all, you attempted suicide. You gave up on life. And so have I."

I couldn't see it. My father, the stone man. The mercury man. I couldn't see myself like him. He was sicker than me. He was so rigid in his beliefs, that he never accepted me when I said I loved Shadow. He told me he never wished to see me again. He simply believed if everyone else thought it was wrong, then he would believe it was wrong too. His mind was always believing in the words of others, even if there was no basis. Always he watched FOX News and believed everything. I wished I could shut the television off and tell him to get help, but he told me I didn't know at all about politics, that these news reporters were gods and knew everything about God and Bush, who also was a god who destroyed so many lives.

The thought of being like my father was making bile rise in my throat. I could feel it surging inside me. The woman and my father, saying I was this terrible being, my body being ready to fry in Satan's pan.

My father wouldn't leave me be. He continued to point his dagger fingers, and he wanted to stab me, he wanted to put more holes in my body. My father wasn't just a maniac, but he was also a murderer. I remembered even if I was in this strange dream that my father had once stabbed me, possibly on accident, as my stomach was seeping of my sins, the yellow pus rising up and being drained by his knives.

My father wanted to kill me again. He wanted me gone. This world was so small, so sparse in its caverns to hide inside forever, I just wanted to curl up and never see my father's face again. I wanted to go back to my father being dead. He was more sane when he was dead, lying in his coffin, his face as white and pale as his hands, marked with bloody scars that were like his insignias, more of life than my father ever was, as I could see the plants beginning to grow in his wounds and show that he was god of this planet, that he commanded everything, and he commanded me that I give up my "lifestyle full of sin", otherwise he would strike me down with his red lightning that were his veins and arteries. His fingers were no longer ghostly, but made of steel, forged with hate. He begged me to be under the blades of Truth. He demanded that his own father shall kill his own son, shall make him regret being given birth to on this planet as well.

"God has forsaken you, Sonic. You can choose to live with your sins, or you can beg for forgiveness from me. I will make sure you are pure and righteous. I will make sure you are dead and your skull is up on my mantelpiece."

He collected skulls. He collected some of rabbits, some of humans, some of lizards, some of birds. I remembered his vast collection as a child. I wondered what they were, but he told me to not touch them. That they were his own special getaways from this life. That they were all the sins he had to remind himself of, everyday.

Maybe he was a murderer. There was no other explanation.

There were flowers around me that grew blades as petals. I could see the world becoming black and white, ready to turn into dust. I knew the only way I could solve this issue with my father was to become him, to make him choke on his words that I was going to end up like him, with pity and shame and my illness all wrapped around me like leprosy. My father was much like the lepers found on the street in Jerusalem, always raving mad, always picking at his skin, always claiming that the end was near and that only Jesus Christ could save him. But I could feel myself becoming godlike as I got closer to him, ready to take away his life, ready to save him from himself. His fingers reached for me, how silver they were, his eyes like burning magnesium, white hot flames that nearly blinded me. His tongue was a needle, and his feet were beginning to drift away from him, like they were being devoured by the tides of the ocean. He laughed, as the knifed fingers reached for my heart, ready to pluck them from my body like a fruit, my father knowing it was never underneath him to eat it. He ate my mother's heart. I saw him do it so long ago. His mouth full of putrid blood, my mother screaming and begging to call 911, and I just sat there, never doing anything to help her.

And I was 17. I could've done something.

But my mouth was stitched like my wrists. I couldn't ever tell anyone anything.

He would kill me like he killed my mother. He would cast away my heart full of its sin. He would turn it into a hot blazing sun, the cold porcelain moon, the stars that littered the sky and were like my father's eyes. Yes, my father's eyes, he stole them from God, he stole the stars out of the sky and made them his own.

He told me it was wrong for me to get better to get back with Shadow. He told me I was too sick, too gone for anyone to help me. He told me I was dead. I would never get better. I was like him. I was insane. I would be in a mental hospital for the rest of my life, like my father, who soon killed himself by cutting his wrists with the broken plastic silverware. I was him. I was him. I was him.

I stabbed him, and he stabbed me. Blood both gashed from our bodies, and I could feel his bladed fingers reach inside me, deeper, deeper, deeper.

"Do you want to die together? Do you want to exchange hearts? So you can live like me? So I can live like you?"

No, because I knew we were both going to die. Our hearts were like cherries stringed with a fork. I could feel him pulling it from my body, its juices seeping from me, the pus beginning to be drained, and I told him I still wanted my heart, I wanted to love Shadow more than anything, I wanted to show him that I could never be like him, I wanted to show him I would be as happy as I used to be, as sane as I used to be, as loving as I used to be. I could see my heart beginning to beat as I thought of him, as my father held it gracefully and swallowed it whole, the bloodstring being pulled from his mouth.

I could still feel it beating inside him, harder and harder and harder until I suddenly thought of it like a locomotive pummeling down the tracks, steam rising from its bones, sweat pouring from my face, my eyes suddenly propped open, suddenly seeing the black cavern of my room and the blue moon in the sky and the blue stars, and I screamed. I screamed so loud I woke everyone else up from their precious dreams. I slammed my fists on the pillow, on the bed that looked so frail that it shook, and I kept yelling about my father. How I never wanted to be like him. No, no, no, I couldn't imagine being him. I just couldn't. I JUST COULDN'T.

The nurses spectacles' I could see in the light, along with the needle of Thorazine, the liquid that I just couldn't get enough of, and I could feel the men beginning to trap me with their burly arms, and I screamed until I was sure I could wipe the hospital with my voice, that the dead could hear me, that the air was full of blood from my voice.

I could see the straitjacket, in its white and heavy padded glory, beginning to come in the room, like the armless spirit that I wished I was, with the feet being so firmly tucked in.

I would be armless and legless, like I always wanted.

It was time for me to be exactly like my father. Like father, like son.


	5. Awaken, Panic Restraint

They came in the middle of the night, wielding the straitjacket and the needles. Their eyes were like nails. Their nails were like eyes. The nurses and the staff held me down, while I continued to shake and scream and mutter and cry about the atrocities my father committed ever since I was a child, as the bed literally became victim to my fists, as I could remember my father eating my heart ravenously, as I remembered that Shadow would never see me again, because I was on a planet full of loonies, people he could never relate with. The eyenails watched me, stared at me, as they gripped a hold of me, and I could feel them with their fangs clinking against their tongue and their voice that they wanted me to be in the rubber room, the very same room that my father considered his home.

I could feel them grabbing my wrists, and the pain! They still felt sore, and they gripped them tight, and I thought I could feel the stitches becoming loose, as if they were demons who wanted to see me dead. They wanted to see me even more ill, I thought. They had pitchforks full of Thorazine, they laughed and they asked me if I was experiencing any pain.

"Are you safe? Are you safe right now you fucking bastard? You putrid pile of vomit? Here's some Thorazine! Go to bed! Go to bed and shut your damn mouth!"

The eye pupils in their nails became dilated, as if they smoked some crack within my skin.

I was in pain, the needle was so sharp in my ass, and I screamed until my throat was tired and was red and sore, until my voice couldn't clamber down the hallways of my pit-soul anymore.

I could remember my father was in a straitjacket the first time he was inside the hospital. They claimed he was truly insane, because he still wanted his collection of skulls on the dresser, and he still had my mother's heart inside his own body. He would laugh all the time when he was in the safety room, and often found himself making it homely and he could even have a set of candles light up the place and my father would consider it his new apartment after my childhood home was condemned. My father, my daddy, his eyes could never truly see the plight of his own suffering. He never understood how much his life would get better if he admitted the things that were bladed inside of him. Of course a lot of things were bladed in there, because I could imagine myself stabbing him too, stabbing him until I could find my mother's heart in my daddy's stomach, and I could take it and put it back in her, even if she was already dead. But if she had a heart back, I feel like she would be more alive than she would be back on the fire place's mantel, her ashes in that blue vase, always asking me the question: why was your father this way? And why didn't I made him get help earlier, before he killed me and before he tried to kill you?

I could never tell her what I thought. Because I didn't know. I thought she was denying everything my father was doing because she wanted to maintain her sanity, otherwise she would turn into my father, into me, as well. Even when I told my mother of all the disgusting things my father did, she would always say I was imagining things, that my father was a sensible man and he would never do something as heinous as eating other people's hearts. But my mother simply wanted to remain sensible, she wanted to never be as insane as us. So she often locked the door to her room and sang. And she tried to sing like the siren's, like the angels in my own version of heaven, listening to her Fiona Apple and Sarah McLaclan so loud that my father could never hear his own voice, and my mother couldn't hear how dingy her singing was after smoking so many cigarettes, and she often coughed and sounded as if she would hack up her heart, like my father always wanted.

I could never hear her tears dropping from her face either. I've seen diary entries where she talks about how she wanted to divorce my father, how she wanted me to get away from him, but she couldn't face his reality. She thought he would kill her if she ever left him. She knew she was doomed to die in this house, that her husband would soon crack like the glass in her wine and begin to make her bleed. She drank so much wine, it was often red, and I remembered she drank sherry so much that her mouth looked like she was eating hearts herself. But she was only trying to drown her own in alcohol.

As the Thorazine took effect, I cried and I wailed and I wished the demons would stop throwing my lifeless body around as the Thorazine melted my strength, as they whispered things about me. Yes, they said to me, we are ready to tell everyone about your mother, about your father, we are ready to tell everyone how sick you are from your past, how nothing will get better for you, how you got the alcoholism from your mother who chain-smoked, the insanity from your father and his obsessive-compulsive cannibalism. We will tell all the dead men in this hospital, even if they don't speak English and only the language of the dead. And their teeth, how they shined like the moon outside my window! I could see their eyenails like sparkling flames, and they simply called one of the other demons here, to put me in the straitjacket, to put me in the world where all the crazies were left behind, the Safety Room, the Rubber Room, the World That Never Was.

I wanted them to stop. I wanted to be sleeping and having another nightmare, one I could wake up from and realize that everything was okay and I wasn't in any real danger. Not a real, truly hellish one that I could never escape from. Not one that I was forced to go through. I could see the demons laugh and smile an abrasive smile, and they told me that I was ready for more "tougher" treatment. I was delusional. I was hallucinating they said. But I didn't believe them! I never believed in them! IT ALL FELT TOO DAMN REAL!

But this kept going. I wished I could wake up, but the pain was real, the flames were real, their teeth were as real as the moon out in the hospital yard. I could feel their sharded teeth grinning at me as they continued to talk about sending me to Hell, as their fingers got under my fur and scratched thin red lines, and the spectacles from one of the nurses I saw before this nightmare was a demon with a large red blushed nose and eyes that were glass. She was blind, and she struggled putting the jacket on me, but I thought she was a nicer demon than the other ones, as the other ones just laughed at her for putting the straitjacket on me the wrong way, and I tried to fight back, my body quivering as I tried to hold back my sobs and I squirmed in their grasp, but my punches and my kicks were so weak, with the green liquid inside me.

I soon had my arms folded and my legs tucked in. I thought I was going to choke as they put the mask on my face, the leather hockey mask, and they smirked as they told me how the look suited me, that I was on my way into becoming a true maniac.

No, I couldn't let this happen. But I was so weak, so covered with bleach and Thorazine. I couldn't make the demons stop insulting me, stop tearing at my face and stop making my wrist bruise more than it already had. I could feel their fingers were like saws, blading through the stitches, searing through the little smiles on my wrist. I wanted to scream, but the mask muted me, choked me, made my yells and discord muffled. I felt all this horror bubbling inside me, so much I wanted to tell the other patients that the nurses and the doctors were here to make you into their slave, their own little toy to play with, and I wanted to get out of the straitjacket and into bed staring at the stars, oh God I wanted this to stop.

Oh God oh God oh God I couldn't contain the fear inside of me. But the mask silenced me. They thought I was as crazy as Hannibal Lecter. But I didn't eat people's hearts like my dad did. At least, not yet.

The demons were talking about me having electroshock therapy. And I thought that the nightmare was getting worse. They said they would plan it tomorrow. That Doctor Marsh approved it. I was ready to get further treatment to help my bipolar, my assumed schizophrenia. My assumed schizoaffective disorder.

Oh God oh God oh God, MAKE THIS STOP. BUT I COULDN'T MAKE IT STOP! I COULD ALREADY FEEL THE LIGHTNING BEGINNING TO JAB INSIDE MY BRAIN, MAKING EVERYTHING DISCONNECTED, MY MEMORIES DISTANT AND BROKEN. NO, I COULDN'T TAKE SHOCK THERAPY. I COULDN'T, I COULDN'T, I COULDN'T!

They were sinking their fangs into me. Their nails that were the color of rubies, the eyes like flaming peacock feathers. Their tails that contained the evil shape of them all, the triangle. Their forked tongues, their serpentine skin. They said I would soon be in Hell. I would soon suffer from my sins. They kept clamoring, droning on in my head that my father was right, that I was his son, his blood relative, and I shared that insanity. Mercury was such a genetic trait in our family.

I could feel the ocean's tides becoming stronger. I could feel them knocking me underneath, I could feel it grabbing me and putting me further into the black depths, and I couldn't fight against it. I was defenseless against my own illness. There was nothing I could do. But to drown and to be trapped underneath the surface, to have my eyes be absorbed by the darkness. To have them be trapped in my father's basement, on his shelf, the many colors of so many people.

(He took my mother's eyes my mother's eyes my mother's eyes)

But the glass demon said to me that she hoped I would get the right treatment. Because she felt sorry for me. She could feel how depressed I was by just touching my clammy skin, how nervous I was, how scared I was from this bipolar that continued to make me unclean and filthy, and she said she understood, and she wished her blindness could stop, but for many years when she woke up in the morning she would see darkness, and it wouldn't go away until she went back to sleep again and she would dream. She said one day my dreams would never be stressful or nightmares, but they would be happy, and I would be glad to be in them. Because dreams contained our unconscious desires, and we could have them in our dreams. They were the only place where we could have everything we wanted.

But even in my dreams, I had nothing, I told her. I only wished to die, I only wished to live in the rubber room like my father, and I knew that was my fate.

The other demons laughed, but as she carried me to The World That Never Was I could feel tears beginning to drip from her eyes and down a long stream from her cheeks. She was a sympathetic demon, one that was rare and not at all like the others who were torturing me, and as I entered the pillowed room, she told me that I would get electroshock therapy, and although it was frightening, she would pray for me.

"I hope you will get better. I really do. I'm so sorry about my friends, they can be so…cruel to people like you. But I understand what you're going through. Bipolar can be like blindness. You're mentally blind to see the actuality of your disease, and you don't realize that it can really kill you one day. But you're doing the right thing, dear. Getting help. That's more than what we can say about our other patients. Some are in here because of their family members or because of the court, but I'm sure you'll get better as long as you realize how much your friend, Shadow, would love for you to be healthy again."

There was a glaring whiteness all over. A place with pillows like soft angel wings beginning to cover me, as I could imagine the angels' symphonies sing in my head, like the sirens I thought were inside the hospital, making everyone misled that they were going to get proper help, proper treatment.

I could imagine this place was comforting to those who were going through a breakdown, feeling peace fill their body at once. But I couldn't feel it. I could feel the jacket tightening against me, I could feel it making me suffocate, and I wished I could take it off and breathe, BREATHE, but I could see the demons staring at me through the blurry glass window on the door, watching my every move, making sure I couldn't take it off with my magical abilities. I was the locked god. I was inside Pandora's Box. If anyone took a key and tried to unlock me, I would release so much havoc on the world, so much pain and misery, and the doctors would simply ask the little girl who wanted me to be free of why she unlocked me, why did she do the unspeakable, and she thought she was simply being a humanitarian, having patients not locked inside a box for so long.

I wished I could sleep inside this room, as I tried to sing about my father, the man who made me this crazy with his genes. Oh, my wicked, wicked father!

My father, the beast. My father, the animal. He liked to eat meat all the time. He said it made him feel alive. I wouldn't be surprised if he was a cannibal. Having all those lovely meats made from man in his basement freezer. Feet, hands, livers and stomachs, he ate it all. My mother saw the bloody mess, the disgusting fridge that was stringed with organs and hearts, and she ignored it. She denied it. She never acknowledged it. My father made sure to eat meat every single fucking day of his life. He ate everything from the people who donated their bodies in the hospital. He worked there, and he would sneak in the donor's room and take nearly everything.

Vile, hideous! My father didn't care what I thought of him. I asked him once when I was a child what he was eating and he simply said he was eating beef. But I remembered seeing the organ be the same shape as a human liver. The same ruddy color too. And I told him that, and he told me to just do my homework or else he would give me another beating. I loved my father when I was a kid. Oh, how ugly and disfigured he was!

I rocked back and forth. I tried to keep myself entertained. But I couldn't do much of anything with my body all tied up. I would be in here for several hours. And I thought I wouldn't be able to take it. To be restrained for so long, with all these locks and these leathers so heavy on my body, the mask making me gasp for air, these so-called "hallucinations" so visible and so real to me. As the demons continued to snicker and point with their red bloody fingers, the fingers with my blood on them. With the bloodshot red eyes.

My father was a doctor. In fact, have I ever told you my father, while crazy, was a very smart man? Teachers in the past called him gifted. He was several grades higher than most children his age. But apparently he dealt with very calm-piercing anxieties. He started washing his hands a lot when he was 11. He felt like he could never stop harming himself at 17. He wanted to commit suicide at 22. He wanted to have a child at 28. He married my mother at 30. He had me at 31. He said I was a disgusting, false child at 34. He even thought I was replaced when I was a child. That they had this shining hedgehog boy, and soon he was replaced by me, the false-hoped sinful son.

I remembered he put organs in a bathtub full of ice cubes. He put me in them too. Watched me burn with the cold. He said it was my punishment for being fake, being not the child he wanted me to be.

He wanted me to believe in God. But I knew that could never happen. Because God hated me too much. I could feel him never love me. Like my father, the false, sinful father. The cannibal, the murderer, the killer and eater of hearts and souls.

Like God.

He had a collection of eyes in his basement, gathering dust on their smooth white shells like eggs. I saw all kinds of colors. Blue, green, brown, even purple. He wanted to keep his purple eyes forever.

For God's sake, I wasn't supposed to touch them, but I did anyways. I didn't realize they were real eyeballs. Until I dropped it on the cement floor and it cracked like an egg.

Why was I telling anyone this? They were secrets I wanted to keep inside me for a very long time. I never wanted to reveal them to you. You just seemed to crawl into my life all of a sudden, wanting to know what I was doing when I was bipolar.

It was too late now. I told you. I told you these disgusting things about my father. And I wished I never said anything. My father should've been erased from my memories. I wished I never had to acknowledge him again.

He wasn't a hedgehog. He was…God knows what he was. He was a demon like the rest of them.

I was going to Hell with him too. I could feel the white flames of the room beginning to take me over, make me hot and sweaty. I could feel the Thorazine beginning to make my eyes fall into a deep slumber. I thought I was dying.

I still never saw Shadow. I never saw him hold my hand, tell me everything will be alright, that I was making the right choice. I wanted him here now more than ever. I wanted to show him that so much shit was being thrown at me, that I was truly crazy, and if he was here, I would feel so much better, so supported.

I wondered if our love wasn't going to last much longer.

The straitjacket felt like lead to my bones. I could feel it crushing me. I continued to rock back and forth, mumbling songs that Shadow and I used to sing to each other before we fell asleep, giving each other lullabies.

I missed those days. I missed those days. I missed those days.

I remembered that our bodies would be entwined on the bed, and we would be warm, even if the fall was so cold to us, as the wind whipped around the house and made the fiery leaves fall all over us. I told him that I felt warm by his side, that I never wanted to get out of bed, because he was my blanket, my protection against anything that wished to harm me, even against my father, the monster hiding in my closet, under my bed.

And he asked me if I felt scared, as I tried not to think about all these terrible things in my mind. His voice was even warm, and I held onto him, wanting the memories to go away. I felt like the tighter I held onto him, the more my father, the death of my mother, all those memories, could go away and I could just love Shadow in peace.

"Remember when you would sing to me to sleep, Sonic? Like you used to?"

I nodded. I could see he felt the tears in my eyes, as I continued to grip onto him like a blanket.

"I don't know what's gotten into you lately Sonic…but if you want me to, I'll sing for you. Just listen closely. Pay attention to my voice and nothing else."

I could hear his voice, as clear as church bells, beginning to usher me into a sense of calm. He stroked me slowly on the head, scratching me behind my ears, and I wished I could remember the song at that moment, as I was tired, and the song was so beautiful, I could feel my heart being lifted from my chest, no longer heavy and full of anxiety and stress, and he listened to my purring as I was gently lulled into a dreamlike state, and when I fell asleep that night, I had a dream that I knew the glass demon was talking about, where I had Shadow with me in our own little dream home, and we lived there, until we were old and crotchety and I forgot about all the terrible things in my life and Shadow forgot all the terrible things about me and we just simply lived together until we would die together. We would be like the orange leaves that were falling right beside our house, ready to fall into a pile of other leaves that were blessed with the love mark, the blush never leaving our faces, especially that very first night we met.

As I thought more of the good times I had with Shadow, my movements slowed down, becoming slow like molasses, and I eventually stopped, my eyelids falling into place. And even when the demons continued to watch me, continued to eat all the other men in the hospital, with their organs and blood sprayed on the blurry window, I fell asleep.

My sleep was dreamless this time. As it usually was when I was inside the Thorazine's threshold.


	6. Electroconvulsive Shock

I could hear their voices rustling from the door. The demons, as they clawed the muddy colored door with their bloodless nails, they were ready to take me in. They were ready to strap me inside The Machine. They were ready to send the electricity in my body, the yellow and blue rivers inside me, the rivers that would make the mercury sea decay. They were ready to send me to Hell. They were ready for me to be absorbed in my shame, my guilt, the regret I had in being born.

The demon with the glass eyes couldn't stop them. She believed in the shock therapy too. And I wanted to question her, ask her why she thought I needed this treatment, even if I was only here for a day, and she said she didn't know, but if the doctor said it was fine, then I needed it. But I knew I didn't need it. I didn't need electricity to jump-start my joyful heart again. I didn't need my heart to be touched with God's hands just so color can form in my eyes again. The eyes that were stolen by my father, I could still feel them becoming a dull gray, as nothing in my life still couldn't bring me joy, as nothing seemed to make my body feel alive, except for the lone heart that squeaked inside me, that was ready to be pulled out and devoured by this doctor who claimed to understand me. His hands would be pale white like my father's, as he put rubber over his fingers, his condoms to the blood inside me.

It was morning. I could hear the men inside the hospital, sniffling and moving and begging for breakfast. But I couldn't see the morning. I couldn't see the pink cut skies, the rosy cheeks of Dawn, the yellow of life as it flowed inside the sky. The golden river was ready to pour down on everyone. But while the sun wasn't black, but a fetus pink, I couldn't see it for more than a few seconds, as they prepared to get the stretcher near me, ready to trolley me down to the Disturbed Ward. I could feel even the cut hands shaking, even when the blind nurse told me it was a procedure that some who were still depressed with medication received, but I kept thinking to myself, as the trolley arrived, that everything wasn't okay.

Everything isn't okay.

I remembered my father got shock therapy too.

And it just made him forget about me. It made him develop amnesia, and he forgot my name, he even forgot why at all he was related to me.

My father, the forgetter. My father, the insomniac amnesiac. Doctors tried everything on him and he thought the only cure that would work was suicide. Lovely suicide. The torrent of despair. I was falling deeper into that whirlpool, drowning further, deeper, never to be seen again by Shadow or anyone else who cared a little bit about me. The very few people who cared.

The soft pillowed room had no windows, while the rest of the hospital had windows that were barred for "our safety". But I never wanted to jump out of them, or even pick up the glass and slice my wrists like I did last time, with the cilantro. I wanted to live. And I wanted to live past this moment, the electrical shocks flaming my brain, making the mercury sea melt and have it absorbed in the rest of my body. But I knew I couldn't argue with the nurses any longer about it. I was doomed to receive this electrical lobotomy, and I wished that Shadow, anyone who cared about me in the past, could come calm me from my wretched stress. Even my mother, if she was no longer ashes, but still alive, and still had her heart.

But I could tell, as the other men patients, the ones who still had their arms and legs and their hearts and souls, they were walking around the ward, and while everyone else was getting a breakfast of pancakes and biscuits, I was getting my breakfast of thunder that came from a storm machine.

I could see them unlock my door, asking me if I felt any better. But I wasn't any better than I was yesterday. Everything was still bloodless and pale, and I could still see the nurses' nails had eyes, their lips eating the other patients' mouths to make theirs work faster, stronger, like my father did with all the organs he stole, from people who wished to help sick patients, who needed the organs more than him.

He claimed he needed them to be healthy. But I knew that wasn't the reason. That never was the reason. It was the only thing he could stand to eat. We tried to feed him bread, spaghetti, steak, all sorts of good foods that I loved, even chili dogs, but he said that this "special meat" gave him nutrients, it gave him the curb to control his obsessions. But I knew that was never true. If anything, it made them worse. It made my father feel guilty, so he kept washing his hands, until he nearly washed all the skin from it like dirt.

Until his skin was blood too, and he felt like licking it clean until he would devour his own hand.

I knew that really wasn't further from the truth.

I could feel my hands shaking as the nurse released me from the straitjacket, and they told me that it was time.

Time to get shocked.

"Sonic, you are ordered to be administered some electro-convulsive therapy over the week. We believe you have very severe bipolar and it can help you with your depression. Come Sonic, we'll have to harness you, but it's for your own safety. It's for your own good…"

The glass demon waved for me. She uttered a "good luck" from her petite red lips. And I thought I could see her cry. The poor lady. The fair maiden. How she tried to understand me so.

I only took my medication for a day, and yet already, in this day and age, they were giving me electro-convulsive therapy. I must've been really ill. Really sick. My bipolar, it made the colors the wrong blend in my eyes, the red and blue becoming a sickly green. It made the world so distorted like a funhouse mirror, so empty and so much stimulation and I could feel the sea beginning to float towards my lungs, that I was sinking further into Neptune's depths, and I wanted to breathe again. To not see the world in these bright colors that I thought I could feel with my fingers and even taste, and this black and white that sucked all of the life out of me like a mosquito with a butterfly needle as her nostril. Ready to suck all my blood and give it to my father. He would drink it like tomato juice, like my mother's sherry.

My wrist was beginning to be dug into again. It bled as they told me to lay down on the table, breathe in and out, be calm, and they will wheel me to the electroshock room, where I could be alive again, where God would strike me with life.

I could hear the nurse's clogs clicking against the floor. It was going as fast as my heart. Sweat was drenching my face. And I wished, I wished, and I wished, that this was simply an elaborate illusion. Like the ones I saw when I was extremely manic, the flowers and plants growing in my blood and creating a bleeding hole when I ripped them out of me. But the demons that surrounded me when I was trying to go back to sleep…they weren't real, were they? Were they the doctors of the night? Was Satan the head of the ward? No, I thought that God was, because he wanted to see me suffer, see me break against his will, my glass bones being crushed by his mighty fingers. I could feel myself becoming weaker as we got closer to The Machine of Storms.

My eyes were already seeing sparks. I wondered if that was a hallucination, or The Machine administered therapy to anyone getting close to it, the shockwave hitting all the patients in the Disturbed Ward, the Taciturn Ward, the Solemn Sorrow Ward.

"Calm down, Sonic. It will be all over soon. It really will."

I didn't believe them. My eyes were pricked with cactus needles. My heart began to beat faster as they hooked a strap against my body, the belt that tightened against my stomach, squeezing it into a little tube, against my fur that was so clammy and so weak and so hurt, and I tried to count slowly, from 1 to 100, as they wheeled me down to the electroshock therapy room.

_1…_

_2…_

_3…_

_4…_

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

I could see the lights blazing above me, as the nurses tunnel me out of the halls. They seemed to come and go so quickly, the lights that kept the hospital alive, the ghostly lights that made me see my flaws, the dead inside the halls, beginning to speak to me slowly, calmly, that I was ready to die, that I was ready to be sent to the earth inside my own black coffin. I would soon be a ghost, just like them.

Just like my father.

The lights reminded me of Heaven. That all these loonies inside this hospital were all inside Heaven, ready to be judged by God before they died. But they were always ghosts, or they were sent to Hell if they were truly bad. And I knew I would be like him, I would be sent to the worst section of Hell, I would be punished for my mentally ill sins, I would be tried for the past deeds of my father and sent to another asylum deep down in the crusted, fiery pitted earth, and I would be tortured for many generations, many seasons, many years, not spending them up here, not spending them with Shadow.

God how I missed him right now. I wished he was here. Here.

As the nurses reached the electroshock room, I saw the door had graffiti on it, both scrawled in red and green and white, blood written from the wrists of other patients, as I could hear other men screaming and dancing and hollering and pointing nails at me and claiming I will die in here, die in here, die in here.

Their pillowed rooms were piss-soaked, some were always in a straitjacket as if it was a trenchcoat to them, some often screamed and sang and banged and were so loud I couldn't focus on my own defeat, my own hellish trip.

How long do these shocks last? Would I forget everything? Would I even forget about Shadow, as my father forgot about me?

And they said they didn't know.

So much for knowledge. So much for getting a damn answer.

And the crazy men laughed as I entered inside the dank room, the darkness overpowering my senses.

The door was so heavy that it took two nurses to open it. That it slammed against the side with such a loud bang that it crashed against my ears.

The room was dark, so black that I could barely see anything, even my white gloved hands that were fermented by my sides, and it had cemented walls that look gray, cold, aloof, not at all a friendly wall in a hospital that claimed it would help you. They had crayons and shit and blood splayed over them, and I could see the electroshock machine looked like a large tape recorder, black and ominous and standing so proud and tall that it was grateful that it could be used again in this century, it was ready to fire my brain, it was ready to make it into the slab of meat my father wanted to eat and fry. Fry it and salt it and season it and cook my brain on the grill. If my father truly hated me, he would've done that, I was sure. Even if I had this deteriorating brain disease that he infected me with.

I could see Doctor Marsh, the doctor who I thought I could trust, the doctor who I thought I could love, telling me all about the benefits of electroshock therapy. But I didn't listen. I knew there were no benefits to it. Unless I suddenly forgot who my father was and why we were related.

"Don't worry Sonic, you'll still remember your father. I treated him before, but…he was an unfortunate case, while you are fighting to maintain your sanity. Shadow here has told me about all the times you were fighting for him, and we're hoping this electroshock therapy will help with your depression. I know it's hard, but you should calm down and take it easy. It will all be over before you know it."

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

_5…_

_6…_

_7…_

_8…_

He told me if I ever had electroshock therapy before. I said no. And I said I never planned on getting any in the first place.

"It really will help you Sonic. Trust me, I'm a doctor. Now stop squirming and let me apply this gel on your head and put this rubber mould in your mouth."

So I wouldn't bite my tongue. So I wouldn't bite my tongue and die and get out of this Godforsaken place. This fucking piece of shit hellhole.

Okay Sonic.

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

_9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16…_

"Everything will be fine, Sonic."

I wished.

I wanted to get out of here, out of this dank room and back to bed, back to the hospital bed where I spent 48 hours in, 48 hours I would never get back, but I still lived with Shadow, I still lived with my bipolar, and I never was involved in this, never involved in this, never involved in this…

"Why do you keep endlessly repeating yourself, Sonic?"

Repeating myself. Repeating myself.

Breathe in again.

Breathe out again.

_17._

_18._

_19._

_20._

They put the mould in my mouth, and told me to bite down on it hard, while they placed these steel headphones near my head.

I wanted to be free. I wanted to never have anything that related to therapy or psychiatry ever again.

Shadow.

I wanted him now more than ever.

Shadow, can you hear me? Do you know how much suffering I'm going through just to make myself into a better person for you? Please come here. Please. I beg of you. I really did want to be healthy. I really did wanted my bipolar treated. But not like this. Not like this.

Shadow, come here, now.

Please hold my hand.

Like that.

Yes, that's it.

Hold it tight.

Please.

I can feel your heart inside your hand.

It's making me calm. It's making me feel better.

Shadow.

I always wanted to tell you…that I loved you. And I did this, all for you. You said I needed help. You said I needed treatment. I needed to get prescribed with medication that worked for me, so I wouldn't end up like my father. You know what kind of awful terrible man he was. Always…I couldn't even say it, Shadow. I can't reveal it to you, but you know that he was obsessive compulsive. So OCD that he couldn't take it anymore and murdered my mom and and he committed suicide. And just thinking that I would hurt you once I fully transformed into my father, eating your…well, never mind that. But please Shadow, please tell me everything will be okay. Please tell me that I am making the right choice. That I will get better. That my bipolar will no longer run my life. Please Shadow…

His grip on my hand was tighter.

He couldn't smile for me, but his look was full of intense concern, and I could feel his heart beating faster, faster.

"You are doing the right thing, Sonic."

I didn't felt like I was. I thought I was suffering more and more in this hospital, that I would soon be broken down into so many organic little pieces. Shadow, you don't understand how terrible it was in here! The dream I had, the anxiety, the delusions…

"I know. But Sonic, I always knew you were a very strong hedgehog. You've overcome so much, and I really think you are the bravest person in the world right now, continuing to live even when things don't seem at all worth it, continuing to wait for another dawn even when the night is so dark, and right now, you're trying to handle this the best you can, this electroshock therapy. Sonic…you can get through this. I know this is tough, but…I really do believe in you. I always believed in you. And if my support is enough to keep you going through this treatment, then I will give you all the support you need. I love you, Sonic. I will do anything for you. And right now, you're proving to me that you will do anything for me. I can tell that you love me too."

Breathe in.

Breathe out.

_21…22…23…_

I couldn't hide the tears inside my eyelids any longer.

I wanted him to stay. I wanted him to keep holding onto me, even if the thunder was rumbling and was ready to cut me.

But he let go of my hand, and watched me from afar. As the doctors were preparing to turn on the machine, I saw him look away, with tears in his eyes.

I hated to see him like this. God help him.

"Alright Sonic, can you count for me again?"

In.

Out.

_24…_

_25…_

_26…_

_27…_

I could see the lights flickering on the machine, like amber fire, ready to singe all the terrible things in my brain.

_28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40…_

In out in out in out in out in out in out in out

I could hear it crackling with electricity, and the doctor was ready to pull the lever.

_41 42 44 47 59 60 51 50 43 79_

AND MY BRAIN HAD THIS FUCKING STABBING SENSATION AND I COULD FEEL THEM DO A FUCKING LOBOTOMY ON ME AND JUST GOD OH GOD OH GOD MAKE IT STOP THE DOCTORS WERE SMILING AND LAUGHING AND SHADOW COULDN'T STAND IT AND HE LEFT THE FUCKING ROOM AND I COULDN'T STAND AND I BEGAN TO CRY AND I KNEW NOTHING WAS GOING TO GET BETTER I WAS GOING TO DIE I WAS GOING TO END UP LIKE MY FUCKING FATHER DOES YOUR TONGUE SMELL LIKE TURKEY MY DAD ATE IT AND HE ATE ALL THE ROAST BEEF IN THE FREEZER HE ATE MY MOTHER'S CHICKEN BREAST HE BURIED HER IN THE CEMETERY TRIED TO GET AWAY COPS FOUND HIM THEY ARRESTED HIM SAID HE WAS INSANE JUST LIKE ME JUST LIKE ME AND HE PROMISED ME THAT HE WOULD MAKE AMENDS FOR ALL HIS ILLNESS THAT HE WOULD GET BETTER IN THE HOSPITAL AND HE WOULD TAKE ME OUT FISHING LIKE FATHER LIKE SON BUT GUESS WHAT HE KILLED HIMSELF I NEVER HAD A FATHER I NEVER HAD A MOTHER EITHER SHE DRANK ALL THE TIME SHE OFTEN BLAMED HER PROBLEMS ON ME THE LITTLE FUCKING BITCH MAYBE I WAS GLAD SHE WAS DEAD MAYBE I WAS GLAD MY FATHER DIED TOO THE ONLY PERSON I HAVE IS SHADOW SHADOW SHADOW SHADOW SHADOW SHADOW CAN YOU HEAR ME CAN YOU HEAR ME SHADOW I WISHED YOU COULD HELP ME I PISSED ON THE FUCKING TABLE AND IT'S YOUR FAULT IT'S YOUR FAULT I AM HERE AND BEING SO FUCKING SICK, SO FUCKING ILL, YOU GAVE ME THIS DISEASE YOU GAVE ME BIPOLAR IT IS A SPREADABLE DISEASE AND YOU HAD IT TOO YOU HAVE BIPOLAR TOO I KNOW YOU DO BUT YOU GOT TREATED YOU FUCKING BASTARD YOU LITTLE BITCH WHY AM I THE ONE SUFFERING ALL THIS TIME WHY AM I THE ONE WHO ATTEMPTED SUICIDE WHILE YOU TRIED TO KEEP EVERYTHING TOGETHER WHAT KIND OF BEAST ARE YOU I KNOW YOU'RE DEFINITELY NOT REAL YOU WERE NEVER REAL TO ME YOU NEVER WERE REAL YOU NEVER WERE REAL

YOU

FELT

SORRY

For

My father

And…

I don't know what to say.

You never knew what my father did.

You never saw his basement.

You never saw his little collections.

If I told you, you wouldn't be with me anymore.

Because I am him.

I am Scott Lee Benkowski.

Not Sonic Thaddeus Benkowski.

Scott Lee. Scott Lee. Scott Lee.

You never knew that, did you?

"Sonic."

My eyes scanned him.

I felt weary, tired, but the nurses left me here, to listen to him, as he held my hand again.

"Your father was a very fucked up man. But just because you had his share of mental illness…it doesn't mean you'll end up like him."

And how did you know?

"Because you're stronger than that, Sonic. Your father, he used other people to feel better about himself. He couldn't find any other coping mechanisms other than to…eat organs. He thought he had to do it cause his brain was extremely…not wired right. He never got treatment for his problems when he was young. By the time he was admitted in a state psychiatric ward, it was too late. It was too late for him. But you…you're still young. You actually just admitted to me that you had problems. That you really want to work on them. And believe me Sonic, you are miles ahead of your father. Just as long as you accept what these nurses and these doctors are saying and let them help you, you…won't be like him. Ever. The only reason I stayed so strong with my bipolar is that your father really showed me how fucked up you can be if you never accept help, and well…I didn't got admitted, but I took lithium for several years, stabilizing my moods. And it worked. And I'm doing a lot in my life now. And you can too Sonic. You're…going to be okay. If you find the right medicine for you, you will have a much happier life. You will wonder why you even thought of suicide in the first place."

He brushed my quills, stroking my face. My hand reached for his, and I let it remain there, as he felt the tears soaking my cheeks.

"I will be with you, Sonic. I will be with you every step of the way. I love you. Please remember that. Please remember that always."

I didn't know what to say.

I could feel his love bursting for me. In his hand, I could feel so much blood rushing into my face, as he wiped my tears away.

"You will be the hedgehog I've always known and loved, Sonic. Now, let's go and talk. We can talk about anything you want. We can even talk about how fall is coming here again. Once you get out, do you want another pumpkin spice latte and just gaze at the golden leaves? I'll pay, and we can just sit on the bench, looking at the leaves that are reflecting the sun. Something tells me the sun hasn't shined for you in a long time. But I can feel it beginning to rise in your world, little by little."

My brain felt fried, but my heart felt loved.

I was free of the harness, and Shadow and I talked. About joyful things. Deep things. Wonderful things.

He said as he held my hand and I began to chuckle at his jokes, a little bit of me was coming back.

The sun was beginning to turn gold, and was beginning to turn the blue starry night into dawn.


	7. The Path to Recovery

I sat on this same couch, the same dark green leather couch that I was acquainted with when I first entered the hospital, and I gazed back at it with pride, as this very same couch, it would be gone soon, erased from my memories, like a piercing shock to the brain, like the electroshock therapy that stabilized me, putting all my moods inside a harness.

(And they would be squirming, pulling their hands out to me, trying to whisk me to a world where I felt the highest of mountains, with clouds and stars around me, touching the goddess' lips, and the lows, where I was back in the earth, crawling with the worms and their shit-spewing mouths, eating nothing but dirt. Dirt that the animals shit on. Dirt that I would lovingly pull apart with my fingers, open my big gaping hole wide, and devour it like I haven't been fed but starved with nothing but electric shocks.)

It became my seat for so long, for as long as many months, I would stare at the celadon walls and look at my holed wrists that were beginning to glow in color, beginning to form and heal, and I realized fully in my head now…that this was the day I would leave the hospital. This was the day I would go back to Shadow, and shower him with love, hug him in my arms until I could feel his heart ache inside him, feel his eyes near my muzzle, hear him crying with joy that I was here, in his silver blue house again, ready to hear the chimes of the clock, ready to hear the chimes of his voice, lulling me to a deep sleep. A sleep with dreams, unlike the kind I get with the Thorazine.

with our hands fully formed like molding clay, creating a beating heart in our fists, creating a bridge, a pathway for our blood and veins to reach us and allow us to beat together, sing together in our harmony with our heart ready to thump inside us. And the nurses, even the one with the glass eyes, she told me that I was ready, and I did the right thing. I got help. I got treatment. And that was more my father could ever give or want. Just like Shadow had told me, all along.

My father, the denier. My father, the liar. He denied ever having obsessive compulsive disorder. He denied ever having any mental disorders, but he knew his brain was streaming with them like a bloody crazed river, inside his neurons would there be a misfire, leading him to wash his hands, to eat the flesh of the hopeful, the flesh of those who wished to help, and he always told me it was a special kind of meat, used to build a fort inside his brain, whatever that meant.

And I believed him. I believed him for so long. Until I decided to stand up to him, and tell him that I wouldn't eat his meat, his disgusting rotted guts as the flies would devour them with acid spit. As the maggots would swarm inside them, pilfering holes in the bodies of those that wished to help, but were ultimately ruined intentions as my father would snag them, sink his fangs into them, and devour his sweetmeat. I watched him many times eating it, with great gusto. He always ate the whole thing, until he couldn't take anymore, until his stomach was bursting of organs, until he thought about ripping his own stomach and devouring it too.

And I was so sick, so ill, and I often couldn't stand to be like my father. But I denied my illness too. The mania, the sweet elixir of dopamine, it made me feel like everything was okay, that I didn't need treatment. But the dopamine release nearly killed me on occasion. The shopping sprees. The collection of guns in my closet, now collecting dust. I was so determined to put one of those shells in my brain, to have myself be relieved of this madness, and I knew that wasn't the answer.

It never was the answer.

And Shadow knew that, all along.

I've spent many days, many weeks, many months in here, without Shadow. Even holidays. Even our favorite month, October, we spent without each other. But he said he understood, even if he missed me so. The staff allowed him to come visit, and we drank to our zest, our heart's content, that we were strong, even with this mercury sea that once drowned us. Now we could finally swim. We could finally swim in the sea, and appreciate how it shined in the sun, how it looked nearly crystal white. Like the lithium I had to take to stabilize my moods. And always, they try to reach back to me, but I simply deny them.

Being stabilized was the only thing I wanted in so long.

I can see the silver sea ebbing away from my shore. The white salty beach of lithium. It tries to eat my feet ravenously, but no longer does it want to drag me under and beat me with its many silver jaws. I knew I could try to swim with the mania, try to roll on with the depression, but they told me I could still be creative without the bipolar. In fact, I could even be more creative.

I thought I couldn't believe them. That the mania always gave me the strangest ideas, the little facets of creativity whenever I thought about something so deeply, my shoes would be worn and torn as I would walk back and forth in the dayroom, thinking of so many solutions to so many problems. The genius seemed to have left me when the lithium salts took me over, parched me dry of inspiration, and I often wondered if this was going to end, if I would still be creative with the lithium, with the dry desert of unimagination.

"You don't feel creative on it, Sonic? There's actually studies out there that prove those who receive treatment with lithium actually are still creative, and in fact, can become even more creative. It's just the flow of thoughts you had in your head. And the ridiculous confidence you would have in performing your work."

I stared at the typewriter. And I thought I could feel it stare at me back, with its steel macheted eyes.

I thought with the lithium I could never fathom writing again, that only the bipolar mess I could make sense out of made me creative. Once the lithium was inside me, all that would vaporize and become drifting blue silver smoke. The smoke of the dead, as they decayed in this lone hospital, among with the other spirits inside here. But as they gave me a couple privileges (for being a good patient, I thought), I had on my red hunter's hat and my plaid tweed jacket, with a cigarette attached to my teeth like a magnet to steel fenced in fangs, and I had the typewriter in my hands, ready to type out everything I experienced in this hospital, in this winter landscape below me, the tree branches drifting in the wind, the chill hitting my face and causing my cheeks to turn flushed and red like a fully ripened cherry, I prepared to listen in on the bird's calls throughout the forest, the breathing of the woodpecker, the river that was acidic ice, petrified and shocked, no longer running except for the lone deers that would sink their necks to drink the arctic water, and as I looked at how much of life I was missing with my illness, the beauty of the forest and wilderness and nature, I thought I was missing so much for so long. The nature that God had taken so long to make, with his glorious celestine hands and his moon eyes, he created all these things for me to enjoy, and I am left with this sickness, this cataclysm inside my mind. And the forest would remain untouched, by my eyes, and I am left with these hospital walls to stare at, the small red crosses becoming my trees, the patients becoming my deer and my birds, and the river being the blood that would cascade over this thin white ice of the floor.

The hospital certainly felt so arctic, with their air conditioner always numbing me, always making me shiver with the touch of its breezy fingers.

When I met Shadow we saw everything and anything together. But now, we spent out time doing nothing. I spent 48 hours in that hospital. I spent 72 hours and more, much more, and that time could've spent on him. And I wanted to change that. I wanted to spend our time in a forest like this, in our favorite season, wrapped in dense blankets that weren't at all weak and light like the hospital's, but they were colorful and as flaring as the red orange and yellow leaves that cascaded down the floor, and we would watch as nature around us unfolded, as the flowers slowly decayed, as the trees dropped their dresses and became bare naked, as the birds soon wanted to move somewhere where the trees were decent and not at all like harlots.

I thought of all those lovely things with Shadow, and I wanted him here, with me, ready to tell people about what I experienced, about the hallucinations I experienced, the cilantro growing in my ankles and knees and wrists, the demons crowing for me to be in a straitjacket like my father, and the electroshock therapy, the experience I had when I held Shadow's hand, the loving sensation flowing through me, along with the bright jabs of God's storm.

But that storm was better than the bipolar storm I experienced. My wrists may never recover from that torrent, that godawful downpour of sadness and black ricketing despair that diseased me.

Someone held my hand as I was writing, the small story that I thought would be in people's minds for many years. I thought it was the nurse with the glass eyes again, but Shadow simply held my hand to his heart, and I could feel it beating.

I would not be like my father. And eat it. Even if it was so precious, 20 karat gold, lined with emeralds and rubies.

I could tell that it was glowing like the sun. The sun that was no longer black.

He told me he was so proud of me, and he wanted me to be happy, and as I felt more into his white sateened chest, I could feel the tears rustling inside him, beginning to drip out like a rain storm, the silver clouds in his head.

I smiled. Even if I knew this would be an emotional moment. I brushed his tears away with the glove of my hand (which has since been replaced since the cigarette burn in one of them), and I leaned over for a kiss, his shoulder keeping me aloft. And he obliged, and I could feel his warm lips on mine, and I felt whole. I felt fulfilled.

I was writing so much since he was gone, I told him. I felt like I had a voice now. That the lithium made me more of a writer than my bipolar. I could see he returned the smile, and he read one of my poems, which was called, of course, Lithium.

_The white metal_

_How it creases and blankets the silver sea_

_It softens and melts into the mold_

_It makes me think_

_Without such a utter violence on the world_

_The salts, they drown me_

_With dryness_

_The vomit keeps rushing_

_From my little black cave_

_They say it's normal_

_They say I'm closer_

_To not decaying_

_The angels have told me_

_This is the right to freedom_

_The right to write_

_I look upon the fallen snow_

_Of all the pages I wrote_

_They create wings from their folded triangular hands_

_I am not forsaken as the_

_Lithium has taken me over_

_The wings tell me what to do next_

_To find a lover?_

_To have my blood white and a bright sheen_

_As bright as the phantom's tooth?_

_I waltz into the doctor's room_

_The smell of cinnamon and Lysol_

_They beckon me to come in_

_Sit and talk_

_And hope the storm inside my head_

_Is over_

He said it was good. Very good. That he never read another poem like it.

He decided to read about my accounts of the other months I've been inside this hospital, the holidays I had to miss without Shadow, but he thought it was good enough spending them in the hospital with me, talking of my path to recovery.

—

It is September. I am cold, and I am empty.

I often feel like a piece of paper, ready to be cut by the wicked tail of the wind. I cannot find solace. I am here, suffering from this Trileptal, the medicine that has been making me sick for so long. I am a yellow, dusty paper, never written a single word, never a single letter. It is beginning to make small yellow marks on my skin. They looked as bruised as my wrists, as my legs from the cilantro-pull.

They had to clip my nails. I often had delusions that insects were crawling inside me, that they were making eggs in my valuable organs that my father would've loved so much.

My father, the egg-eater. The ones with pupils and corneas. I don't know if he ate eyeballs, but I knew that wasn't beyond him. He ate anything that came out of the human body. I'm sure he even did something with people's teeth. He probably made a necklace out of it. Made a necklace from the nails. I'm sure if he was still in Hell he would've liked to collect my nails, as they flew away from my fingers, those still having color inside them unlike my father.

I've forgotten many things. I often worry I would forget the memories of me and Shadow, spending all those times every holiday, having bonfires outside our house, having Thanksgiving over at his family's, having Christmas in his house (so quiet and blue it was, with his blue staccato wallpaper! But I have grown used to it, and I never mind the silence at all, and in fact, Shadow and I would bask in it, listening to the chimes of the clock and the crackling of the pit, just…thinking of our futures.), and New Year's, where we would talk about the things we accomplished, the triumphs we achieved. I hope being treated in this hospital would be one of them, as now I am crying that I can't spend those times with Shadow, that I would end up on one on one, without seeing him for a visitation. I often feel like I'm ready to kill myself. I often think of what it would be like if I made the blanket covet my neck, strangle it until it was as blue as my fur. It was the only way I could think of dying, but I knew they were watching me, watching my every step. I couldn't do anything in this damn hospital! I was stuck here, not really living, and not really dying! I was in Limbo!

Nothing to do, except to stare at my battle wounds and be bored. There was the TV, but it was often stale and uninteresting. There were puzzles and games, but I wanted to play with no one. Absolutely no one wanted to bother me, all those crazy dingbats. They say that I'm too crazy for their craziness, and I couldn't be invited in their damn little shitty reindeer games.

I wished this illness hadn't taken over my life. I love the mania, the flow of madness, the bursting with life and energy, the blooming of the roses as they would bleed all over the floor, all over my senses and all over my wrists and all over my eyes, but now it had to be no more. The nurses pitied me, but I knew they wanted to harm me. I knew they wanted to dessicate me and open me up like a fucking baked potato. Have the medicine roast me on the inside, have it make my body and organs pop open and have them look inside. And they would gaze at me with wonder and fear. I knew they did that already, that the pills were cyanide, disgusting acid that threatened to dissolve my insides.

I popped open one of those pills before. I saw salt and acid inside it. It ate through my bed, tore a hole in it, and I didn't tell anybody, because I didn't want the nurses to know that I was beginning to understand their plan, their plan to hang me like Jesus Christ, crucify me for all the patients to see, for me to die for their sins. I could imagine it all in my head, the machine it was, with the many gears and steam engines and everything that made my brain function. I understood that sometimes the lows made the machine malfunction and have the owner, the conductor, be faced with a great emptiness as the cobwebs would collect on the pedals and the switches, but once the highs kicked in, it made the machines work faster and harder until they broke, and I wanted to feel it again. I can't imagine writing again with this sanity. All writers were a little bit insane, whether it was from alcohol or childhood abuse (daddy issues like mine) or mental illness, they all had something that made their writing flow like music, like a piano playing somber tunes by a somber man who had thick wiry hair and whose eyes always looked sad and blue. I imagined the writing as my piano, my platform to play to all the world, but with my moods stabilized, it doesn't sound as magical, as musical, as lyrical. The music is flat and toneless. And I didn't know what to do about it. The lithium magic, it took my life away! It drowned me away with its acidic pill! It dissolved my soul, my being! I couldn't write like this, without the music playing so clearly in my head! I couldn't do much of anything without my piano, except dance, but without the music, I couldn't dance either.

I was withered and embittered. I had nothing to make me alive. I imagined myself like those flowers at the nurse's station I tried to smash, the colors ready to dissolve onto the checkered floor. Their blood was my blood. I was suffering from the lack of suffering in my soul.

All my writing was sad and pathetic. I always wrote such sad things that made people get their energy sucked out of them. They often told me I was always depressed, but I often found solace in writing these terrors, these things that always kept me up at night, and right now, I couldn't sleep, because my father always kept me up with his sodium smile, his moonlight fingers, his eyes that shined like iodide and death. He wished he could have purple eyes like the rest of the special people in the world. He wanted to switch his eyes because he felt his were flawed anyways, that he had to wear glasses and he was extremely near-sighted. But he never got to perform that surgery on himself, because he soon committed suicide, and either way, he would've died by his own hands, no matter how much of a skilled surgeon he was.

He soon didn't went to work, even if he had surgeries to do. He just ate his bloody drugs and did nothing else. I remembered he might've snorted some cocaine too. He claimed it made him have energy. He might've done meth too. The bastard tried all sorts of drugs, all sorts of insanity-driven things, just to get his fix, just to feel better.

He would never get help for his OCD. He never got help for that same disease he gave me, bipolar.

Heh, bipolar? They said it might've been schizoaffective disorder. Whatever the hell that meant. And they said it was a terrible mood disorder, with the symptoms of both schizophrenia and bipolar.

I knew nothing about the disorder, except as I heard the diagnosis, I could feel my insides reek, dying a little faster inside. All I wanted was just peace from my disorder, but the Trileptal hasn't been giving any of that to me. I still feel sick, disgusted, holed with the claws of the mercury sea, and I felt like I couldn't stop being sick. It was a habit now. A Godforsaken habit that I couldn't stop, like my father couldn't stop washing his hands.

My flesh would be as bone dry as his. I could feel them warping in the sun's light, underneath my gloves with the cigarette burn inside them.

I don't feel cured. But cured is just a hopeful word, something that could never happen. I would forever have this disorder, this disease, this decay.

I could never be happy. Until the mania bloomed again, and I was sent to a frenzy with my writing, with my crescent needles ready to be inserted inside me, ready to put me back in the dreamless world of Thorazine.

And with that, I am going to bed, away from this nightmarish reality and into a nightmarish dream. At least when I wake up, I realize it's not real. And I wished I could do the same with reality, but I was stuck here, and God wanted me to suffer, for I was his new son, his new Christ.

Jesus Christ is no longer in Heaven. He is in Limbo.

—

It is October. The light feels more tangerine, more bright, and the colors beckon me to get up, to experience the beautiful world around me.

It was my and Shadow's favorite month. Fall was beginning to clamber down the steps of Seasons, and it unfurled its glorious dress, the reds and oranges and golds, and she would smile at me, telling me that the cold would prickle my skin, but it would always feel nice, and I could feel the soup and drinks warm my soul. I wished I was out of this hospital, so I could spend that time with Shadow, to watch the leaves fall and dance in the wind, to go to the cafe and have our usual apple cider, and watch as the woods began to fall in their splendor, to shed their old colorful skin, now bare and gray, ready to be picked apart by winter. And we would talk of many things, things that made us happy, things we could always hope for.

They told me Shadow was coming for a visit, but I thought I couldn't believe them, that he would never come see me in the condition I was in.

My body was touched with purple spots. I started bruising myself a lot more often. The Trileptal didn't help me much, so they put me on Depakote. And I often felt tired. Depressed. I didn't want to get up and do anything, as the nurses would drag my lifeless body out to the group room. They told me if I didn't participate in any of their activities I would be stuck in here longer. So be it, I said. I thought I was stuck in here forever.

My gloves were gray. My fur was matted and thorned. I often felt like I was dirty. But I didn't shower in so long, no matter what the nurses said to me. It was difficult for me to bathe. I couldn't imagine doing it everyday. I hated being the servant to my body, always cleaning it, always brushing it, always making sure it didn't smell ripe. But I knew if I didn't had to do it once, but nearly everyday of my life, it would be too difficult for me to do. I just wanted to do it just one time, and never having to think of it again. The nurses keep saying to my doctor of how much I didn't care much for my appearance anymore, but he keeps putting me on different medication, medication that I felt has always never worked. Not to mention the electroshock treatments he gave me for a couple of weeks, being plugged into that giant tape recorder and having my body shake with the tremulous might of God and Zeus. I felt like I couldn't take it anymore, that I wanted to be out of the hospital, into the blue house Shadow had, the silver blue wallpaper that I often thought was so depressing, but now, it seemed comforting, more comforting than these green walls that always appeared in my dreams, the halo of heaven, the place I always wanted to be since I've heard of my father going to his own little wonderland, the fiery gash of Hell.

My father, he was a Lutheran too, and always, he told me to pray before I would eat my dinner. My dinner of liver and onions that I refused to eat, that I knew was yet another liver from another hedgehog.

He told me the meat was good for me, that it would make a huge difference in my life if I ate it everyday, just one little morsel, it could make a huge difference.

All I had to do was eat it.

And it lied on my plate, a deep bloody juice seeping from it, the knife cutting through its body, it looking miserable and orange after it was torn from the hedgehog's body, and I thought I could hear it crying as my knife sunk into it.

And he told me to eat it.

Eat it.

He told me I would feel so much better if I ate it.

The fork dangled from my mouth, as the liver I thought I could hear continued to scream and call me a cannibal. A disgusting creature. Why was I listening to my father?

The smell was disgusting. I could hear the maggots worming their way through it. My father probably didn't bother keeping it in the fridge. I could hear the maggots, munching, munching, munching through the dark red organ.

My hands shook.

I didn't want to be called a cannibal, no matter how well the meat was cooked, how nice it tasted. I didn't want to do such a disgusting thing, to be claimed as insane as my father, as he ate his liver diligently, as he craved the next bite as soon as he swallowed it.

I wanted to get away from this dinner table. To close my eyes and wish I could teleport out of here with my father's shadow so large, looming over me like a wolf about to eat a sheep, his fangs so black and so sharp like saws, and I could imagine my father ready to eat me if he so wanted to, like I could imagine he would do to my mother, the princess with the cancer-coated throat.

He looked at me expectantly, as he completely devoured his plate. And he kept telling me I could eat it, I could feel better, I could have my illness cured, because it helped him, it made him not do his OCD-rifled actions as often.

But I knew that was a lie. And as his green-bladed eyes continued to saw through me like his damned black teeth, I told him I wasn't going to eat it, that I didn't want to be sick.

"You won't be sick. When did I ever told you you'd be sick eating your dinner? Your mother ate it!"

She just took her plate to the other room, and then threw it in the trash. Without batting an eye on how my father believed cannibalism made you feel better about yourself and your mental health.

He scorned me with those loveless eyes. I could tell he hated me, for simply not being a part of his insanity. I told him I wasn't going to do it, because I could tell this was someone else's liver, that he was eating various parts from other people. And he told me it was a lie and it was just good old cow liver. The finest he could ever get from his slaughterhouse.

My hands continued to tremble when I put them on the table, staring at my plate, my father's shadow appearing bigger, darker, his fangled teeth beginning to tear through my conscious.

And I took the plate and broke it. I made the liver sit there, rife with flies and sins, and I told him I would never eat his food, because I could tell there was always something deeply wrong with it. I knew he tried to poison me too. Sometimes he puts cigarette ashes in his chili. Sometimes he would put laxatives and rat poison in all his little deadly concotions. My mother never ate it, because I knew that she always knew and always ate somewhere else. She always ate at fine restaurants, as my mother often got a lot of money being an entertainer, but she never shared that money with me. Or my father.

I felt like both my parents hated me. My mother was as sweet as saccharine at times, but she barely paid attention to me, because I knew she was too busy trying to forget about the existence of my father. She said she once wanted to divorce him, but she never believed in divorce, and she tried to tell me that she thought my father was a fine man, but he needed to go to work otherwise she would leave him because he was a slob, but I knew my father only went to the hospital for one reason only, to get his meals and to prepare them as nicely as he could for his supposed family to eat.

As I thought more of my family's past, the nurses told me that Shadow was here, and that while they would forbid it, they allowed him to bring some apple cider, and we sat together on that small round table, discussing my plans, and discussing the little things in life that Shadow was photographing, telling me I would never miss another fall's moment without him.

I told him that yes, I missed him, but I wasn't ready yet to get out of here. That they're still trying various medicines on me. I was now on Depakote I told him, and I told him it really wasn't working for me. I often felt tired, lethargic, and even as I sat with him drinking our apple cider, I felt like I needed to quickly go back to bed, else I would pass out in front of him.

"If it isn't working for you Sonic, then you need to try something else. The reason they call it medication is because it's supposed to make you feel better. If it doesn't make you feel better, then you need to tell them why you don't like the medicine and try something different. Again, I'm on lithium, and it has really helped me. It's usually the first choice they give to people like you, and I'm surprised they haven't started it yet."

I wasn't sure if I wanted to try it. It seemed like a dangerous drug, a toxic drug that would kill me, but he told me that I was here for this reason, for everyone to monitor me with my medication.

"They'll make sure your lithium levels aren't too high or too low. Lithium does seem like a scary drug, but it's made a huge difference in my life. I'm able to function at my job and I'm able to function when we're spending time together. And now it's your turn. Just ask them that you want to try it and see if it works for you. I'm sure you will be able to brave through the first side effects. It will make you tremor or even make you sick if you don't eat something first before you take it, but I know you're really strong, Sonic. I know that you can do it."

I stared at my apple cider, until Shadow placed his hand over mine. I wanted to look away, but no, this was one of the things that Shadow told me I could look forward to once I got treatment. Once the bipolar vanished.

He kissed me. I felt warm, and my cheeks were red, as red as the fall's first fallen leaf.

I held his hand, and told him I will get better. I will suggest to be put on the lithium. For him. For his sake. For my memories' sake to never be like my blood-curdling father.

Soon, he had to leave. I wanted him to stay here, be another patient with me, be sick with me forever, sleep in the same small bed, sleep in the same pink fragile blankets, but he said he had a job to go to, he had to help pay the bills, he had to help paying for my medical expenses. I felt ashamed that he was the one paying for it, but he told me to not worry about it, and he'll take care of everything.

He gave me the photos, which the staff also allowed me to keep. I looked at the furling dresses of the trees, beginning to droop down and unsheathe, showing the trees naked breasts, and I wished we could go outside and look at the wilderness, but he told me soon, we would be able to do that, but not now. Not while I was sick. Not while I was trying to recover.

The path to recovery was a granite road, full of sharp stones while you strolled on it barefoot, while the sun was sharp and glazed on your skin while it popped with sweat. But it was a road I was willing to not give up on. It was a road I wished to see the end of.

—

November had many storms. Both the storms of fall, as the rain was streaming on my windows, and the storm of my bipolar. But I thought it was beginning to quiet down. It was slowly dying away.

I could see the rain streaking on the window, as I no longer wanted to stare at the walls, but always, I gazed at the windows, as I wanted to see the woods next to the hospital, the stars shining gallantly and the sun that I noticed becoming a little bit brighter, setting and rising. The sun was orange now, ever since I got on the lithium, the drug that Shadow suggested for me to take.

The cloud dragons left their tails in the skies. And the raindrops soon would be dried in the sun's heat, no longer letting the screens drink their might every time the storm lion's roared and shook the sky.

They agreed not taking the Depakote was a wise idea if it made me extremely tired, and now, the lithium salts were down my throat, into my stomach, forcing me to throw up every time I didn't eat something with it. The doctors made note of it, and now I eat the salts with every meal, and often it didn't made me sick, although the tremors and the thirst was beginning to be irritating.

But I could tell it was working, as the sun I saw was no longer black, but a deep russet bloody color. It was a little unsettling, but I knew that was a start. That the sun would soon become brighter, and no longer would I be stark weak and cold against the black sun.

Shadow came to visit me again, and the staff allowed him to give me his mother's recipe of yams that I always loved. He asked me if I was feeling better on the lithium, and while I couldn't see much of a huge difference, I knew I was getting better, in increments, little by little. And he told me it was better than nothing.

"If you can feel it working, then it will work. You just got to keep taking it. Soon you'll notice a huge difference. And those side effects you're getting, they'll eventually go away. Once you get used to it it won't bother you as much. The first week taking it is always hard, but once you get past it, you'll feel a whole lot better. I can guarantee you that."

I told him that I wasn't sure if my lithium was going to heal everything. Make the scars in my wrist stop hurting, make my mind not as slow and dull like it usually was when I was on these mood stabilizers. But Shadow lifted his hand and stroked my cheek, which he could catch a few hints of tears in them.

I hated crying in front of him. But I felt so confused, so riddled with questions about this medication and how I was supposed to feel. He always collected my tears. I thought his gloves were much like the window screens after a storm, the drops dripping down until they fell to the floor. I thought of myself as nothing but a rainstorm, like the outside, as the rain began to down its tremble, a small drizzle, very few tears being collected on the sidewalks.

The highs, they made me feel like I was powerful. That I was a god like the Greek gods, their madness always giving them instances of brilliance, their bodies always feeling true suffering from both their mind and the punishments from Zeus, even my father, the sick Apollo, who ate the flesh of the dead. I couldn't imagine leaving those wonderful feelings, that feeling of being raised in the air by some lone creature who would soon sink his claws into you and make you smashed on the floor, the lows, the burn and crash you can get by riding in your little rollercoaster, your little adventure through your moods.

"I miss them sometimes too. But the more manic you are, the more your depressive moods are going to make you feel like you're in deep emotional pain. I experienced those too. Such a fleeting high where I felt like I could challenge everyone and defeat even the police when they were handcuffing me for drinking and driving, and when I was in jail, I suddenly wanted to kill myself. I tried to die by anything I could get, until I was sent to solitary confinement because I was depressed and suicidal. And I hated it. Even if the other people in jail were shitty to me and hated me, I hated how quiet it was for some reason. How I sat so alone in that jail cell, with no one who gave a shit about me wanting to help me with my depression, because my mother and father kept telling me, as the disease was handed down to them throughout many generations too, so they knew how it went: to get treatment. And to stop drinking. And to stop doing God knows how many other drugs I was lapping up. You never knew the me before I got treatment Sonic, I was fucked up. And while my parents tried their best, they knew that the only way I would truly get better is if I realized I had a problem and I had to talk to my doctor. The highs may be great, the creativity may seem so strong in your mind, but I would rather be stabilized than get back to that again. Even if it seems like I could never be as happy as I was when I was manic."

I finished my yams, as I always did when his mother produced a heaping plate for us to feed on (his mother always believed in finishing a large plate of her food was such a big compliment, so I always tried to do the nice thing and finish everything even if my stomach felt like it would burst) and as we stood in the starking light, we hugged, and he told me that he hoped I would be much better during the Christmas season. And we could spend Christmas together, at his house, listening to the beating of his clock, the beating of our hearts, and the beating of the fireplace as it singed and devoured the wood with its flaming orange teeth.

As visitation hours were over, my heart felt like it was floating again. I knew I would slowly get better. The doctors would make sure of that.

I was getting closer to the end of the Road to Recovery. I could feel my head be pumped with the medication, the lithium driving the silver sea back to the throes of my brain.

—

It was December. I could feel the frost collecting on my fingers, collecting on my eyes, the frost even dusting my nose. But while the hospital was cold, even if the blankets never seemed to keep me warm, it was time for me to leave, as my heart was warm, as I would arrive back at Shadow's, just in time for Christmas.

I sat typing on the typewriter, feeling so proud that I still had the magic mind, that the mercury sea didn't at all made my writing full of that magical spark go away, the ignition to set a reader's thoughts on fire with my own flames.

The nurses and doctors walked out of the hospital and told me I could leave now, that Shadow was waiting for me with open arms.

The nurse with the glass eyes, I saw her there, with her clipboard deftly to her side, even if I thought she couldn't see it. She told me that she was so proud of me that I got better, that I was ready to make such a huge impact on my life. No longer would it roll with the sorrow, the suicide attempts and the mania that had me hallucinate, full of fervor over my downward spiral, full of the passion I had for drinking down pints of vodka, the pity I had for myself simply because of my father who passed down the insanity to me, for my mother who was murdered by his bloody steeled surgical tools. My father, I will no longer remember him. He was a true monster, a true wolf in sheep's clothing, and I no longer need to feel like his illness was my fault and that I was overall responsible for it. I now know that I will not be like my father, for I admitted I had issues, that I needed help, and the lithium shores, they made the sea no longer so daunting, so scary.

And most of all, I felt…happy. And I haven't felt that way in such a long time. Ever since the last mania had dissolved away.

My wrists no longer felt like they were sore and damaged. I still had the barbwire inside of them, but I no longer called it barbwire, but stitches. And they kept me alive, from all the acts I pulled throughout the years. Acts that I thought were the right choices. But they were simply emotional acts, things I thought would keep me more alive by killing more feelings inside me.

Shadow met me down the hall, and I could catch a hint of a smile. I smiled too. And I tousled his quills, and he laughed, and I laughed too. We laughed all the way to his car. The hospital hall's rang with it, and I hoped it gave people happiness, because I often wished there were people who showed me it was possible to be happy in this place. I often sat on that chair and stared at walls and stared at the swollen, universal wrists. The other men in that hospital often just talked to themselves while the nurses never seemed to show love or happiness to anyone, because the room seemed to be so dark, so infected with insanity. But I knew it was possible to be happy. Because the sun was yellow as we drove out of there, and it followed me all the way to his home.

The skies were fuchsia, dotted with bleached and smiling stars. My breath came out in small little puffs of smoke, as my body was warm, warm with positivity and opportunity, and I could feel color returning to my hands again, no longer ash white like my father's were, thank God.

And God. Of course. I felt like he didn't hate me anymore, but just gave me a challenge, a challenge to overcome these obstacles, to fight through these creatures, these shadow monsters that came underneath my bed when I was a child, with the appearance of the wolf, my father, the meat-eater and the purple-eyed canine with fur of flames that always wished to see me burn.

But I never did.

I couldn't see myself ever falling in his footsteps. And I fought. And I made it.

I felt like I had fully recovered. That I was ready to get back to my life, after my falling from trees.

The trees were so tall as we drove through the winter woodscape. They looked like when I was up above them so long ago, they pierced heaven, and I was so close to seeing the face of God.

—

It was so silent that I could hear the snow falling outside my window.

I could hear the clock chiming, the fireplace brewing.

I knew what day it was. I knew what Shadow was doing. I could smell him making something for his mother, to celebrate the holiday back at her house once we were done spending time here, together.

I knew it was Christmas.

The fire crackled. I gaze at the cerulean walls and sighed softly, for I felt so peaceful, so much lightness in my heart and soul. I've never felt so calm in a long time, that the bipolar storm inside my head was gone, that it quieted down, and now, it was only a gentle rain that continued to water the flowers and help everything in my world grow.

He sat so still, patient, waiting for his casserole to bake, waiting for me to arrive. I saw him stabbing the fire with the poker, while humming old Christmas showtunes that his mother would always play back at her house. And I sat right beside him, feeling the warmth of the fire as it massaged me, as Shadow hugged me closer to his fur, and I listened to his heart, how radiant it was, how soft it sounded underneath all that silk.

I felt warm. Safe. And I never wanted to be anywhere else in the world.

"I'm glad you're here," he said. "I thought I would spend Christmas, all by myself, without you. I understand you wanted to get help, but I would've felt so lost, so shattered, if I didn't get to spend this day with you. Because I consider you a part of my family, a part of my stars in my sky. I consider you a part of my universe. And I'm glad you're here, recovered. I hope those things will never hurt you again. I never want to see you so sad, so lonely, when you know you have me, your guide. I will make sure you aren't hurt, ever again."

I closed my eyes briefly, listening to both the fire and his heart split the wood, his own passionate flames inside his chest.

"I know I'm going to be hurt again, Shadow. That's how life is. It's a series of feeling good and being hurt, feeling good and being hurt, but the bipolar…it made it unbearable. I feel like I'm more capable in dealing with those hurts that life is going to bring me. Knowing that suicide won't solve anything, knowing that I have you with me through the darkened times, through the times where the light is so strong I think I can't see, through the black suns and the gold suns, the blue suns and the bloody suns, I know I can deal with them all. And I feel so…loved with you, Shadow. That I'm glad I experienced all those things, whether they were terrifying or they made me feel hope, that now I can sit with you in your home and just…relax."

I closed my eyes, as both his heart and his fireplace were warming me, the silence lulling me to a deep, tranquil sleep, and I could hear him softly humming as he held me, singing Bing Crosby's "White Christmas".

I could hear the clock beginning to chime along with the song, telling us it was 7:00. But it wasn't time to leave. And right now, I didn't wish to leave. I wished we could stay here forever, perched among Shadow's universe, gazing at the gods as they smiled at us, as they took delight in me, conquering my demons, my fears, and that I was closer and closer, to becoming a constellation like Taurus and Orion, like the two Dippers, like the Ursa.

The clock droned on, the fire continued to speak to me in tongues, and I fell asleep, listening to the lithium shores in my head welcome the mercury tide, as I sank my feet into the wet sand, smiling, laughing, holding onto Shadow's hand as the bipolar sea no longer looked so scary. It was a beast we conquered, a creature that will always sink away to the horizon.

The sun was pink, like a newly born love. It shined all of the world, and it kissed my face as we faced the sunset, watching as another day died away, until it would flare back again like a revived phoenix, the sun forever gold.

No longer black like it used to be. No longer shining that misery as I would sleep in my bed with Shadow, kissing and singing and laughing, as the sun was as pure and as bright as our hearts, our love.

I was so high in those trees again. I fell to Hell and got back to the face of God. And I could hear him in his mighty voice say, "You've done so well, my son."


End file.
